6 ms·

Google reinstates account of thomasmonopoly

90 points by tshtf 15y ago

abcd_f 15y ago
tl;dr version, anyone?
- DarkShikari 15y ago
  Google mistakenly flagged a legal image he uploaded as child pornography.
  - darinpantley 15y ago
    They have an automated system for this. If your account is flagged they don't talk to you about it for legal reasons.
  - powerje 15y ago
    Mistakenly, sure - in Monopoly's own words: 'I too found the image bordering on the limits of what is legally permissible'
sauteedbiscuits 15y ago
What is troubling about this is not that Google mistakenly removed the account. What is troubling is: 1: This guy had to go to the fucking MOON to get his account back, ranting and raving on twitter like a mad man- and it took nearly a week!! 2: Google's support sucks- God help any of us who is in a similar position. 3: Even getting Google's attention is not enough. Since there is no formal appeals process, you have to harass Google employees in a informal method. Matt Cutts even said on a HN thread that "Google took the appropriate action" - So what is it? Did he break the TOS or not? This is the whole issue. Without a formal process, you just get knee jerk reactions. Any person other than this guy would have stopped trying after Matt essentially said he wasn't getting it back. 4: Even after all that, he did not even know why his account was deleted for a week. 5: For all Google's talk about data liberation, they suck with this. Takeout only gives you access to useless social crap and if you want to download your email its a long process that involves reading guides, using POP, IMAP, etc.. How about just giving me a link to download my mail? 6: No warnings, no contact- This could have all been solved if Google asked first and shot later. * Link to where matt_cutts looked into this and still decided he cant have his account back: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2795465 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2795465
- sorbus 15y ago
  None of this is news. People complain about Google's lack of support all the time; it is a well known issue. Also, complaining about having to use POP or IMAP to pull out your email? Seriously? It's a standard, it lets you import them into any email program you want, and just giving you a compressed archive of everything would be a nightmare of compatibility if you wanted to do anything with it but read the messages in a text editor.
- fpgeek 15y ago
  It is absolutely true that Google has their support issues, and they should be criticized for them, but... Do you seriously think there is any other US provider (i.e. subject to US child pornography laws) that would have behaved any better? Given the allegation, it probably was legally risky for Google to keep his data at all. There are laws that criminalize even the "innocent possession" of child pornography. Had things gone another way, I presume Google would have argued they were preserving evidence, but they have to be very, very careful regardless. I'm absolutely certain there are many providers who would have behaved worse (account closed, no comment, no investigation, no appeal, data given to the police then deleted). In the alternative scenario, many of the things you want Google to do could easily be illegal. After an allegation, any warning, contact or access to data could easily have been construed as aiding and abetting a crime in progress and/or obstruction of justice (particularly by an ambitious, headline-seeking prosecutor). What you don't seem to understand is that, once the allegation was made Google couldn't do squat for @thomasmonopoly without risking criminal charges until they determined the allegation was false. And that determination was going to take time no matter how you slice it. Personally, I find it hard to think of what Google could do better in this sort of situation. My two suggestions (and I'm not sure they're practical): 1. Commit to manually reviewing every automatic suspension for these kinds of potential criminal allegations. 2. Be clear about when an account is being suspended and investigated versus suspended with a final determination made.
  - tdfx 15y ago
    Why not remove/disable the offending material? From what I've read he didn't have any calendar appointments like "Friday 12:30pm Take windowless van to the candy store". Why kill access to completely unrelated services because an automated (possibly error-prone) process flagged a picture?
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
ghshephard 15y ago
I'm wondering what type of system all the naysayers would have in place that would properly balance the requirements of google, the law, the community, and the individual users - and how they would scale that to ten million+ users. If you can describe it, design it, deploy it, and operate it - you might have the beginnings of a multi-billion dollar social network on your hands. Rather than rant at google/facebook for their inadequacies, go out and ship something that will truly demonstrate how wrong Google/Facebook are.
- felipemnoa 15y ago
  That's like me telling you that certain food sucks and then you telling me "you do it then". The food sucks, I didn't say I could make it better. If I could I would. However, the food still sucks. Just because I cannot fix it doesn't mean that it doesn't suck.
  - fpgeek 15y ago
    If you can't even point in the direction of a fix, then there is the possibility that the food can't be made better. If it genuinely can't, I think you have to revisit the question of whether or not it sucked in the first place. To take an extreme example, if you told me a debugger sucked because it couldn't predict in advance whether or not running your program would end with an exception, I'd tell you that you didn't have a reasonable or useful scale for debugger suckiness.
    - felipemnoa 15y ago
      >>If you can't even point in the direction of a fix, then there is the possibility that the food can't be made better So what you are saying is that if something sucks and cannot be made better than I should not say it sucks. Maybe you should not even be making the food in the first place. Start from scratch and make something totally different. Saying that something sucks is a valid criticism. Saying why it sucks would be even better so that the person taking the criticism understands why but that is besides the point. If something sucks, it sucks. Caveat: suckiness is in the eye of the beholder. I'm sure it sucks for the person who's account gets closed and he doesn't even know why. >>To take an extreme example, if you told me a debugger sucked because it couldn't predict in advance whether or not running your program would end with an exception, I'd tell you that you didn't have a reasonable or useful scale for debugger suckiness. Yeah, suckiness is in the eye of the beholder. You believe it doesn't suck, I believe it does. To be fair, your example is a really extreme case and that is not what we have here, therefore it is completely irrelevant.
yaroslavvb 15y ago
That's the trouble with child porn...when something is defined as "I know it when I see it", there's going to be a lot of cases incorrectly classified. This reminds me of Walmart child porn case http://trueslant.com/KashmirHill/2009/09/22/in-defense-of-walmart-in-the-bath-tub-photos-a-k-a-child-pornography-controversy/ http://trueslant.com/KashmirHill/2009/09/22/in-defense-of-wa... To just highlight the difficulty of "what is child porn?" problem, it wasn't just Walmart's officials, but local police who took the complaint, prosecutor that initiated the case and probably a number of other officials in the pipeline who made incorrect determination
Matt_Cutts 15y ago
(I'm totally speaking for myself personally here, not in any official capacity.) As the post indicates, Thomasmonopoly's account wasn't disabled for something like misusing AdWords; it was an investigation of potential child pornography. Thomasmonopoly himself says in his write-up that "I too found the image bordering on the limits of what is legally permissible and hoped to highlight the fact that it is allowed to exist within a grey area of legality." Google has a zero tolerance policy for child pornography. I am glad that Thomasmonopoly got his account reinstated after a full investigation, but it's also incredibly important that Google takes appropriate action on potential child pornography, and United States law compels companies to react to child pornography in certain very specific ways. For what it's worth, I got a chance to do a question and answer session with some congressional staffers earlier this year, and one of the things I said was that (in my personal opinion), current laws on child pornography were suboptimal. Here's a quick example from a few months ago: http://www.winknews.com/Local-Florida/2011-04-29/Fla-Senate-expands-states-child-pornography-law http://www.winknews.com/Local-Florida/2011-04-29/Fla-Senate-... "The Florida Senate voted to extend the state's anti-child pornography law to include not just possessing but also intentionally looking at such images." Looks like the text of the bill is here: http://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2011/0846/BillText/Filed/PDF http://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2011/0846/BillText/File... and I don't see any exemption for people who fight or take down child pornography. And that was literally the first link I found after doing a search on Google. So in theory, looking at images in the process of trying to fight child pornography could be illegal. You don't need to dig far to find similar brittle examples. That's why I'm glad that I work on webspam and not on trying to stop child pornography.
- fpgeek 15y ago
  Can you give us an idea of the scale of the problem? Is handling flagged accounts something that could plausibly be improved by creating a "large enough", dedicated team? Or do legal and/or practical constraints (e.g. too many cases to look at) prevent that?
  - Matt_Cutts 15y ago
    (Again, just answering for me personally, not with my official Google hat on.) Good question. Just like a good programmer finding a bug should ask "How could I prevent this bug from happening next time?" it's pretty common that when a situation like this occurs, the relevant people at Google ask "How could we prevent this situation from happening next time?" In this case, I believe the solutions that have been proposed elsewhere on this thread (letting the outside person know about the suspected violation, letting the outside person have access to their data) can be fraught with potential legal difficulties. I'm sure that people at Google will be discussing what different steps could prevent a situation like this from happening in the future.
dendory 15y ago
Looking at the link to the pictures... they aren't even remotely 'risky'... except maybe in a Church or extremely conservative home.
- carbonica 15y ago
  He explicitly states early in the post that the image in question is no longer uploaded to the picasa album.
troels 15y ago
Additionally he has said that Google is proud of their zero-tolerance policy Seriously? Does anybody think this is OK? If there was a crime, shouldn't it be the legal system that dealt with it, rather than some corporate entity, like Google? This sounds awfully lot like a witch hunt to me. The least they could have done was inform that they had handed the case over to legal authorities.
- owenmarshall 15y ago
  > If there was a crime, shouldn't it be the legal system that dealt with it, rather than some corporate entity, like Google? Yes. But corporate entities must handle these situations carefully. If your web host botches the DMCA process, they are liable. If Google's support technician accesses child pornography on Google, that technician risks child pornography charges. It's an absolute case of a corporation covering their ass, but absolutely needed in this legal environment, especially around radioactive allegations like possessing child pornography.
  - troels 15y ago
    I still don't understand why Google can't advise the user that the account is suspended for legal reasons and that it has been handed over to the authorities to deal with. Just closing it and go silent, is really not acceptable, as I see it.
    - owenmarshall 15y ago
      In some cases, informing the user of the presence of a subpoena is illegal. These secret subpoenas are typically used in conjunction with the PATRIOT Act, but could be in use elsewhere. For example, Nicholas Merrill (John Doe, of ACLU v. Ashcroft) was hit with a national security letter that barred him from disclosing anything about the subpoena, even that he had received a subpoena: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doe_v._Ashcroft http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doe_v._Ashcroft. As a response, some providers have started providing warrant canaries: http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt They're obviously not infallible and have never been tested in court, but at least companies are trying.
flocial 15y ago
Wow, Google couldn't just tell him, "dude, you got kiddie porn in your album". I commend this person's frankness but it still comes back to the lack of communication happening with Google support.
- Locke1689 15y ago
  That could be construed as assisting in the commission of a federal crime.
binxbolling 15y ago
I guess I'm still not sure why a questionable photo in Picasa means a total ban from all Google services. Or, couldn't users get a warning that they're about to be perma-banned? E.g... "The Google Gods have banned you. You have 48 hours to save any data you wish to keep. Afterward you will be unable to log in & access any Google product." They'd still have backups of everything regardless of what the user does in that 48 hours if they'd like to initiate legal proceedings or whatever.
- pavel_lishin 15y ago
  "The Google Gods have banned you. You have 48 hours to collect your child pornography." Yeah, that would be fantastic. They should, however, tell you precisely which part of the TOS you violated - down to highlighting the specific words.
  - hackinthebochs 15y ago
    >"The Google Gods have banned you. You have 48 hours to collect your child pornography." This is completely a non-issue. If the user already potentially committed a crime, Google already has the evidence. Whether or not the user is able to go back and redownload images that may or may not be illegal that may not have been saved is completely inconsequential. The issue is for the false-positive cases or the borderline cases. Google is not the law; let the judicial system determine guilt.
    - pavel_lishin 15y ago
      > Whether or not the user is able to go back and redownload images that may or may not be illegal that may not have been saved is completely inconsequential. With all due respect, unless you're a lawyer, your comment has zero weight. If I rent a hotel room and use it to store a barrel of cocaine, and a cleaning lady discovers it, I'm fairly certain they are 1) under no obligation to me to allow me to retrieve my cocaine, and 2) are probably legally prohibited from allowing me to collect my coke barrel.
      - 15y ago
scott_s 15y ago
I find it difficult to believe he did not suspect these images triggered the ban. In that regard, I find it disingenuous when he said he had no idea why his account was terminated.
- 3pt14159 15y ago
  Really? That slideshow is benign and I've never heard of someone having their Google account banned because of something like this. I would have assumed AdWords a hundred times over.
  - scott_s 15y ago
    The image in question was removed. His own take on the image: I am not angry at Google about this, as some might suggest, only because I too found the image bordering on the limits of what is legally permissible and hoped to highlight the fact that it is allowed to exist within a grey area of legality. I find that sentiment hard to reconcile with the "I have no idea" claim. I don't think he was outright lying, but I suspect he was in denial. edit: Just realized I said "images" and not "image" in my original post. I was thinking about the image even he thought was a legal grey area.
bowyakka 15y ago
I would be interested in _how_ someone would develop an automated system for detecting child pornography, as has been said not only is the legal definition subjective, but it would appear that possession and analysis is illegal. That would make building a training set hard .... I can only imagine those responsible for developing such systems would require serious therapy as well.

90 points by tshtf 15y ago

abcd_f 15y ago

tl;dr version, anyone?

DarkShikari 15y ago
Google mistakenly flagged a legal image he uploaded as child pornography.
- darinpantley 15y ago
  They have an automated system for this. If your account is flagged they don't talk to you about it for legal reasons.
- powerje 15y ago
  Mistakenly, sure - in Monopoly's own words: 'I too found the image bordering on the limits of what is legally permissible'

sauteedbiscuits 15y ago

What is troubling about this is not that Google mistakenly removed the account. What is troubling is: 1: This guy had to go to the fucking MOON to get his account back, ranting and raving on twitter like a mad man- and it took nearly a week!! 2: Google's support sucks- God help any of us who is in a similar position. 3: Even getting Google's attention is not enough. Since there is no formal appeals process, you have to harass Google employees in a informal method. Matt Cutts even said on a HN thread that "Google took the appropriate action" - So what is it? Did he break the TOS or not? This is the whole issue. Without a formal process, you just get knee jerk reactions. Any person other than this guy would have stopped trying after Matt essentially said he wasn't getting it back. 4: Even after all that, he did not even know why his account was deleted for a week. 5: For all Google's talk about data liberation, they suck with this. Takeout only gives you access to useless social crap and if you want to download your email its a long process that involves reading guides, using POP, IMAP, etc.. How about just giving me a link to download my mail? 6: No warnings, no contact- This could have all been solved if Google asked first and shot later. * Link to where matt_cutts looked into this and still decided he cant have his account back: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2795465 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2795465

sorbus 15y ago
None of this is news. People complain about Google's lack of support all the time; it is a well known issue. Also, complaining about having to use POP or IMAP to pull out your email? Seriously? It's a standard, it lets you import them into any email program you want, and just giving you a compressed archive of everything would be a nightmare of compatibility if you wanted to do anything with it but read the messages in a text editor.
fpgeek 15y ago
It is absolutely true that Google has their support issues, and they should be criticized for them, but... Do you seriously think there is any other US provider (i.e. subject to US child pornography laws) that would have behaved any better? Given the allegation, it probably was legally risky for Google to keep his data at all. There are laws that criminalize even the "innocent possession" of child pornography. Had things gone another way, I presume Google would have argued they were preserving evidence, but they have to be very, very careful regardless. I'm absolutely certain there are many providers who would have behaved worse (account closed, no comment, no investigation, no appeal, data given to the police then deleted). In the alternative scenario, many of the things you want Google to do could easily be illegal. After an allegation, any warning, contact or access to data could easily have been construed as aiding and abetting a crime in progress and/or obstruction of justice (particularly by an ambitious, headline-seeking prosecutor). What you don't seem to understand is that, once the allegation was made Google couldn't do squat for @thomasmonopoly without risking criminal charges until they determined the allegation was false. And that determination was going to take time no matter how you slice it. Personally, I find it hard to think of what Google could do better in this sort of situation. My two suggestions (and I'm not sure they're practical): 1. Commit to manually reviewing every automatic suspension for these kinds of potential criminal allegations. 2. Be clear about when an account is being suspended and investigated versus suspended with a final determination made.
- tdfx 15y ago
  Why not remove/disable the offending material? From what I've read he didn't have any calendar appointments like "Friday 12:30pm Take windowless van to the candy store". Why kill access to completely unrelated services because an automated (possibly error-prone) process flagged a picture?

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

ghshephard 15y ago

I'm wondering what type of system all the naysayers would have in place that would properly balance the requirements of google, the law, the community, and the individual users - and how they would scale that to ten million+ users. If you can describe it, design it, deploy it, and operate it - you might have the beginnings of a multi-billion dollar social network on your hands. Rather than rant at google/facebook for their inadequacies, go out and ship something that will truly demonstrate how wrong Google/Facebook are.

felipemnoa 15y ago
That's like me telling you that certain food sucks and then you telling me "you do it then". The food sucks, I didn't say I could make it better. If I could I would. However, the food still sucks. Just because I cannot fix it doesn't mean that it doesn't suck.
- fpgeek 15y ago
  If you can't even point in the direction of a fix, then there is the possibility that the food can't be made better. If it genuinely can't, I think you have to revisit the question of whether or not it sucked in the first place. To take an extreme example, if you told me a debugger sucked because it couldn't predict in advance whether or not running your program would end with an exception, I'd tell you that you didn't have a reasonable or useful scale for debugger suckiness.
  - felipemnoa 15y ago
    >>If you can't even point in the direction of a fix, then there is the possibility that the food can't be made better So what you are saying is that if something sucks and cannot be made better than I should not say it sucks. Maybe you should not even be making the food in the first place. Start from scratch and make something totally different. Saying that something sucks is a valid criticism. Saying why it sucks would be even better so that the person taking the criticism understands why but that is besides the point. If something sucks, it sucks. Caveat: suckiness is in the eye of the beholder. I'm sure it sucks for the person who's account gets closed and he doesn't even know why. >>To take an extreme example, if you told me a debugger sucked because it couldn't predict in advance whether or not running your program would end with an exception, I'd tell you that you didn't have a reasonable or useful scale for debugger suckiness. Yeah, suckiness is in the eye of the beholder. You believe it doesn't suck, I believe it does. To be fair, your example is a really extreme case and that is not what we have here, therefore it is completely irrelevant.

yaroslavvb 15y ago

That's the trouble with child porn...when something is defined as "I know it when I see it", there's going to be a lot of cases incorrectly classified. This reminds me of Walmart child porn case http://trueslant.com/KashmirHill/2009/09/22/in-defense-of-walmart-in-the-bath-tub-photos-a-k-a-child-pornography-controversy/ http://trueslant.com/KashmirHill/2009/09/22/in-defense-of-wa... To just highlight the difficulty of "what is child porn?" problem, it wasn't just Walmart's officials, but local police who took the complaint, prosecutor that initiated the case and probably a number of other officials in the pipeline who made incorrect determination

Matt_Cutts 15y ago

(I'm totally speaking for myself personally here, not in any official capacity.) As the post indicates, Thomasmonopoly's account wasn't disabled for something like misusing AdWords; it was an investigation of potential child pornography. Thomasmonopoly himself says in his write-up that "I too found the image bordering on the limits of what is legally permissible and hoped to highlight the fact that it is allowed to exist within a grey area of legality." Google has a zero tolerance policy for child pornography. I am glad that Thomasmonopoly got his account reinstated after a full investigation, but it's also incredibly important that Google takes appropriate action on potential child pornography, and United States law compels companies to react to child pornography in certain very specific ways. For what it's worth, I got a chance to do a question and answer session with some congressional staffers earlier this year, and one of the things I said was that (in my personal opinion), current laws on child pornography were suboptimal. Here's a quick example from a few months ago: http://www.winknews.com/Local-Florida/2011-04-29/Fla-Senate-expands-states-child-pornography-law http://www.winknews.com/Local-Florida/2011-04-29/Fla-Senate-... "The Florida Senate voted to extend the state's anti-child pornography law to include not just possessing but also intentionally looking at such images." Looks like the text of the bill is here: http://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2011/0846/BillText/Filed/PDF http://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2011/0846/BillText/File... and I don't see any exemption for people who fight or take down child pornography. And that was literally the first link I found after doing a search on Google. So in theory, looking at images in the process of trying to fight child pornography could be illegal. You don't need to dig far to find similar brittle examples. That's why I'm glad that I work on webspam and not on trying to stop child pornography.

fpgeek 15y ago
Can you give us an idea of the scale of the problem? Is handling flagged accounts something that could plausibly be improved by creating a "large enough", dedicated team? Or do legal and/or practical constraints (e.g. too many cases to look at) prevent that?
- Matt_Cutts 15y ago
  (Again, just answering for me personally, not with my official Google hat on.) Good question. Just like a good programmer finding a bug should ask "How could I prevent this bug from happening next time?" it's pretty common that when a situation like this occurs, the relevant people at Google ask "How could we prevent this situation from happening next time?" In this case, I believe the solutions that have been proposed elsewhere on this thread (letting the outside person know about the suspected violation, letting the outside person have access to their data) can be fraught with potential legal difficulties. I'm sure that people at Google will be discussing what different steps could prevent a situation like this from happening in the future.

dendory 15y ago

Looking at the link to the pictures... they aren't even remotely 'risky'... except maybe in a Church or extremely conservative home.

carbonica 15y ago
He explicitly states early in the post that the image in question is no longer uploaded to the picasa album.

troels 15y ago

Additionally he has said that Google is proud of their zero-tolerance policy Seriously? Does anybody think this is OK? If there was a crime, shouldn't it be the legal system that dealt with it, rather than some corporate entity, like Google? This sounds awfully lot like a witch hunt to me. The least they could have done was inform that they had handed the case over to legal authorities.

owenmarshall 15y ago
> If there was a crime, shouldn't it be the legal system that dealt with it, rather than some corporate entity, like Google? Yes. But corporate entities must handle these situations carefully. If your web host botches the DMCA process, they are liable. If Google's support technician accesses child pornography on Google, that technician risks child pornography charges. It's an absolute case of a corporation covering their ass, but absolutely needed in this legal environment, especially around radioactive allegations like possessing child pornography.
- troels 15y ago
  I still don't understand why Google can't advise the user that the account is suspended for legal reasons and that it has been handed over to the authorities to deal with. Just closing it and go silent, is really not acceptable, as I see it.
  - owenmarshall 15y ago
    In some cases, informing the user of the presence of a subpoena is illegal. These secret subpoenas are typically used in conjunction with the PATRIOT Act, but could be in use elsewhere. For example, Nicholas Merrill (John Doe, of ACLU v. Ashcroft) was hit with a national security letter that barred him from disclosing anything about the subpoena, even that he had received a subpoena: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doe_v._Ashcroft http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doe_v._Ashcroft. As a response, some providers have started providing warrant canaries: http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt They're obviously not infallible and have never been tested in court, but at least companies are trying.

flocial 15y ago

Wow, Google couldn't just tell him, "dude, you got kiddie porn in your album". I commend this person's frankness but it still comes back to the lack of communication happening with Google support.

Locke1689 15y ago
That could be construed as assisting in the commission of a federal crime.

binxbolling 15y ago

I guess I'm still not sure why a questionable photo in Picasa means a total ban from all Google services. Or, couldn't users get a warning that they're about to be perma-banned? E.g... "The Google Gods have banned you. You have 48 hours to save any data you wish to keep. Afterward you will be unable to log in & access any Google product." They'd still have backups of everything regardless of what the user does in that 48 hours if they'd like to initiate legal proceedings or whatever.

pavel_lishin 15y ago
"The Google Gods have banned you. You have 48 hours to collect your child pornography." Yeah, that would be fantastic. They should, however, tell you precisely which part of the TOS you violated - down to highlighting the specific words.
- hackinthebochs 15y ago
  >"The Google Gods have banned you. You have 48 hours to collect your child pornography." This is completely a non-issue. If the user already potentially committed a crime, Google already has the evidence. Whether or not the user is able to go back and redownload images that may or may not be illegal that may not have been saved is completely inconsequential. The issue is for the false-positive cases or the borderline cases. Google is not the law; let the judicial system determine guilt.
  - pavel_lishin 15y ago
    > Whether or not the user is able to go back and redownload images that may or may not be illegal that may not have been saved is completely inconsequential. With all due respect, unless you're a lawyer, your comment has zero weight. If I rent a hotel room and use it to store a barrel of cocaine, and a cleaning lady discovers it, I'm fairly certain they are 1) under no obligation to me to allow me to retrieve my cocaine, and 2) are probably legally prohibited from allowing me to collect my coke barrel.
    - 15y ago

scott_s 15y ago

I find it difficult to believe he did not suspect these images triggered the ban. In that regard, I find it disingenuous when he said he had no idea why his account was terminated.

3pt14159 15y ago
Really? That slideshow is benign and I've never heard of someone having their Google account banned because of something like this. I would have assumed AdWords a hundred times over.
- scott_s 15y ago
  The image in question was removed. His own take on the image: I am not angry at Google about this, as some might suggest, only because I too found the image bordering on the limits of what is legally permissible and hoped to highlight the fact that it is allowed to exist within a grey area of legality. I find that sentiment hard to reconcile with the "I have no idea" claim. I don't think he was outright lying, but I suspect he was in denial. edit: Just realized I said "images" and not "image" in my original post. I was thinking about the image even he thought was a legal grey area.

bowyakka 15y ago

I would be interested in _how_ someone would develop an automated system for detecting child pornography, as has been said not only is the legal definition subjective, but it would appear that possession and analysis is illegal. That would make building a training set hard .... I can only imagine those responsible for developing such systems would require serious therapy as well.