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> A Google spokeswoman said the company stands by its decisions, even though law enforcement cleared the two men. Wow. Just wow. This is worse than the usual G

• mike_hock 4y ago
  Welcome to fascism. A private company is the de-facto judge, jury and executioner because it owns half the infrastructure you live your life on.
  • HL33tibCe7 4y ago
    And you can’t even escape these companies by moving to another country. They have their tendrils everywhere, except in places that consciously prevent them - which is usually done by even worse tyrannies like China/Russia. Always makes me laugh when I see employees of Google, Amazon etc. claiming to be “anti-fascist” and “standing in solidarity with the common man” etc etc…
    • blueflow 4y ago
      You still have the choice to not use any of their services. You can get pretty far in life despite not using the internet at all.
      • hosteur 4y ago
        Well not in all countries. In my country you are required to receive electronic messages from the government as well as to have a government issued ID and authentication system that forces you to have a fairly recent smartphone. For now, it is theoretically possible to use the authentication system without a smartphone but you will have to jump through an awful amount of (artificially imposed) hoops. Not having an internet connection is NOT an option. There is a legal process to get a special permit to avoid having to use these state mandated electronic systems but it is almost only theoretically in that you will need to have a doctor's note saying that you are unable to use such systems. E.g., by suffering by severe dementia or similar.
        • blueflow 4y ago
          Which country are you speaking of?
          • bbarn 4y ago
            I'm not sure about OP, but here in Iceland having a smartphone with electronic ID built into it is not TECHNICALLY a requirement but life can be very difficult without it. It is the de-facto identification system used by every government service and banking institution.
          • vetinari 4y ago
            Afaik mandatory government-provided mailbox is in Czech republic ("datovka") and Slovakia, at least for some parts of population (like enterpreneurs, lawyers, other professions that communicate with state institutions), with general mandatory use coming soon. They serve the fiction of confirmed mail delivery. If you don't pick it up from this mailbox, it is considered delivered anyway and your problem, if you miss something here.
        • threeseed 4y ago
          I find this incredibly hard to believe. Governments have accessibility obligations and so their key services should absolutely be usable with something like Chromium/Linux. And it definitely shouldn't be more onerous than using a smartphone.
          • vetinari 4y ago
            For example, see https://www.slovensko.sk/sk/na-stiahnutie https://www.slovensko.sk/sk/na-stiahnutie It is the portal for Slovak republic. You are supposed to have your national ID card, which is a smart card. To use it, you need a smartcard reader and an application, which basically listens on localhost and is kind of a intermediate between your browser, the pages than need authentication and the department of state, which handles IAM. That application runs on Windows, Mac and Debian (9,10)/Ubuntu (18.04,20.04)/Mint (19.20) (it is not open source). Other distributions are not supported, forget ChromeOS. It is quite onerous. You have to enter your PIN for smartcard about four times, before you see the content of the inbox.
      • leereeves 4y ago
        How would you (for example) apply for a job without the Internet?
        • blueflow 4y ago
          Postal? Or deliver the envelope in-person to their box when they are nearby. I learned it like this, its since recently that applying by email more commonly an option.
          • wormer 4y ago
            As someone who's in college and looking/lookedfor internships to do over the summer, postal is literally not an option anymore. Companies will not offer a mailing address to their hiring team at all, and if you send something via mail they will simply not look at it. Also, post-pandemic, most interviews are done via Zoom, so how are you going to do that then? Even if you're in the same area as the company you're applying in, they just will not let you into the building.
            • blueflow 4y ago
              This sounds really bad! Where are you from?
              • wormer 4y ago
                New York City, and I don't think it's bad. The effort it takes for me to apply to jobs, and conversely, to approve/reject applicants (according to other people that I've talked to) is easier than having to sort through a ton of junk mail. People on Hacker News like to propose "just use low-tech!" or "just self host!" often and I don't get how that's a solution. I _could_ spend hours of my day printing out and mailing my resume to companies (if they allowed me to) and waiting days-weeks for my response _after_ they made their decision (during which time I still have to pay bills and have no job) or I could apply with one button on Linkedin and get my response back instantly. It just saves so much time. Others will say that that's a small price to pay to retain my freedom, which might be true. But what's not true is the other qualities of life that internet and big data affords me. If I don't have instagram or snapchat I literally lose all spontaneous contact with my friends and family. Sure, I _could_ mail them a letter, but with the delay in communication a lot of the intimacy is lost, and we would truthfully just talk a lot less. This, along with a lot of other problems (how do I contact my professor for help after class? go to their house?). Combined with the fact that I would have to be _extremely_ thorough and make sure that my data is scrubbed from all of Facebook/Google/Twitter/Whatever and it's subcompanies, it's just not a real solution. It's actually really annoying that so many are content with infeasible individual solutions instead of advocating for things like pushing against the EARN IT act or the like. I shouldn't have to have a computer science or cyber security degree to be private online - it should be done for me by the government. I don't know what the fuck is in that vaccine (or any medicine I take for that matter) but I can trust that it does me good because of regulations.
      • dessant 4y ago
        In some cases Google can only be avoided at a potentially life altering personal cost. Consider how many government services use reCAPTCHA, and what it means to have no access or delayed access to these services.
        • blueflow 4y ago
          I don't buy this. This would mean that elderly people are also excluded from these services.
          • dessant 4y ago
            Elderly and marginalized people do suffer because of restricted access to online services. People who cannot access the web and its services are at an obvious disadvantage in life, and that sometimes can have severe consequences. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32304320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32304320
            • blueflow 4y ago
              And this is legal in your place?
          • kergonath 4y ago
            > This would mean that elderly people are also excluded from these services. Having helped my 92 years old grandmother sorting out her tax returns on the government’s website, I can confirm that this is exactly what it means. And it’s the only practical way of communicating with the administration. Most local branches have been closed to the public, and the phone lines are congested all day (and cut you off after one hour waiting, which is always fun).
      • bambax 4y ago
        The sentiment is noble, but that's not really true.
      • kornhole 4y ago
        It is funny how some consider the internet synonymous with Google and the other big players. You don't need to use Google and the others at all these days. So many alternatives abound. The problem seems to be awareness of them. Ask me anything.
    • dudidrbtb 4y ago
    • tjpnz 4y ago
      >Always makes me laugh when I see employees of Google, Amazon etc. claiming to be “anti-fascist” and “standing in solidarity with the common man” etc etc… Having had the pleasure of sharing the elevator with said individuals in shared office buildings the "common man" part almost made me lose my coffee.
      • prox 4y ago
        Yeah, it is obvious from all of Googles actions they have lost the script. We are a long way from the don’t be “evil mantra” and “let’s do this for humanity!” I really wish it wasn’t so, but when your company serves the advertiser you aren’t serving humanity. The balance is off and which each passing year it isn’t getting better.
      • spaceman_2020 4y ago
        Nothing says “common man” like 500k in stock options. Big Tech monopolies need to be resisted
    • revolvingocelot 4y ago
      >claiming to be “anti-fascist” I can't fault them too badly for that. I consider myself personally against the horrors that go into gathering the constituent materials for, and the assembly of, computers. This position co-exists with the fact that I, like most others here, derive the majority of my livelihood from Doing Things With Computers, which wouldn't be possible without the computers themselves, which wouldn't be possible without the horrors. Worse still, I live a provably better life than those of my peers whose youth did not, for whatever reason, revolve around Doing Things With Computers, let alone the far-flung people whose labour provides me with the computers on which I do those profitable things. It's difficult to morally reason about.
    • threeseed 4y ago
      > And you can’t even escape these companies So you are forced to use an iPhone or Pixel phone, forced to search with Google, forced to use AWS. Even though open alternatives exist for all these who would love your support.
    • EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
      What if I use Huawei phone, which is banned from using Google services? Obviously, China will have all my info, but they can't (yet) ban me from boarding US trains for low social rating, so what do I care?
      • kornhole 4y ago
        You never know when Huawei or China will start doing something similar. You could do better and not have your data sitting with any corporate or government entity. I love my private Nextcloud running on a Raspberry PI. It syncs all contacts, calendar, files, bookmarks, tasks, notes, phone location, and much for may family's degoogled phones and PC's. Own your data and systems.
        • blooalien 4y ago
          If only that were the normal … But we've now allowed multiple generations to be trained by the "big" ISPs to believe that we're not a part of the Internet, but simply consumers of it. Back in "the old days" most people who used the Internet were fully aware that their Internet connection made them a node on the Internet and that they had the ability and right to run personal or even public services on their Internet connection. These days, people don't think that way anymore. It's just a service to be consumed, like television, and apparently it would not exist at all without so much advertising that you often cannot even see the content of a web page at all without an ad-blocker.
          • kornhole 4y ago
            We are taking it back, bit by bit. This is why I make these comments to make people aware that it is possible and really not that difficult anymore.
        • EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
          >> much for may family's I would better let Google have all my photos and track my location than my father ...
    • LinuxBender 4y ago
      And you can’t even escape these companies by moving to another country. In my personal view the internet became one big country with overlapping laws and government policies and collusion by corporations. Ever so often I use google to see what search results they can muster but otherwise I don't use cloud storage and do not find myself depending on google. For email I try to teach my friends how to use Thunderbird so they can click a button and their email is mostly GPG encrypted. If I wanted to share files with someone that will not fit in that GPG encrypted email then I plonk them down on a mini-PC or a VM and share them over HTTPS with cache-control headers to reduce risk of file caches or SFTP with authentication. This is just my own preference and I am a stodgy cranky old bastard but if someone decides that basic auth is too much friction then it was not important for them to receive the files. I implement my own data retention and destruction policies. How my doctor or lawyer decides to store the files is up to them. I can only hope they are wise enough to not store things on their fondle-slab. An intelligent doctor should be able to handle basic authentication and/or be able to follow simple instructions for creating and sharing a GPG public key with me. Or I could just snail-mail them an encrypted USB drive, however a GPG encrypted email should suffice for sending a few little images to a doctor. Some will bring up rubber hoses and wrenches but there are mitigations for such things. Some might even want legislation to to bandage these dark patterns but experience has taught me to not trust that corporations would be held to account at the same level and standards as citizens.
  • isodev 4y ago
    With the flick of a switch, they can deploy this technology to a global scale and way beyond protecting children. Imagine the feature propagating to their Chrome browser or their smart speakers "listening in" on what's happening in your home to "prevent" crimes by sending the cops whenever you raise your voice or say "the wrong things." This kind of power should not be in the hands of a single company. Edit: I recently read this book called "The Every" which explores a similar scenario https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/57792078-the-every https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/57792078-the-every
    • mirekrusin 4y ago
      Who needs cops if you have an army of robots.
      • giantg2 4y ago
        And who needs prisons if the private infrastructure becomes so integral to life that they can just shut you out of participating in society.
        • public_defender 4y ago
          Unfortunately prisons, which are increasingly private for-profit enterprises, will continue to exist. Think about it: if you're banned from google, how will your body continue to generate revenue?
          • yyyk 4y ago
            What makes you think the body is useful? Robots will be able to do everything better, and if not, there'll be no shortage of labour. The body is mostly a cost center. If we strip down the human to a mind in a box it's so much cheaper (and no need for guards either!).
            • public_defender 4y ago
              Well, you are correct in the sense that only the consciousness needs to be incarcerated in order to sustain the profit model, but: (a) compute cost for uploaded brains is probably more than the cost for the pig slop and water/sewer bills of current model. Recall that prisons right now almost never have AC. If you're going away from corpses, you'll have to pay for that. (b) Cost of caring for the physical body has pretty much been solved by the markets. The customer has a social network that sends money in and pays transfer fees. This network also pays per call and email. Then the customer purchases food and clothing at monopoly prices, since... it's a captive market! Just imagine the ARR hit when people stop eating.
  • tsol 4y ago
    Unfortunately there are some issues that people get so angry over, they'll support fascism openly if it means being against it
  • deepdriver 4y ago
    "The word fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signals 'something not desirable.'" --George Orwell
    • prox 4y ago
      Yeah also think the word/concept fascism doesn’t fit here. While it is obviously oppressive or unjust, it is a company, so what would be a better fit?
      • wormer 4y ago
        It's literally capitalism. It's the system that Google was allowed to thrive in and become this powerful.
        • peaslock 4y ago
          Power concentration is inevitable regardless of the system because in order to enforce decentralization you would need to, well, concentrate power. Our best bet is to shame those using products of unethical companies.
          • wormer 4y ago
            Google isn't a government entity, it's a private company. Had there been more restrictions on what tech corporations (and corporations as a whole) could do, power could have been limited by the concentrated power of government. The issue here is that Google can dictate how we live our lives so heavily without any of its users having a say on how Google and its services should be run. The promotion of Laissez-faire capitalism here in the US promoted Google's growth into it's current position.
            • scarface74 4y ago
              So what would you like The government to “prevent” Google from doing in this case?
  • free652 4y ago
    Nope, the final call was made by NCMEC. The article is a bad one, didn't highlight how the process works. And it's a federal law that google is obliged to follow. https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim-title18-section2258A&num=0&edition=prelim https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim...
  • Dobbs 4y ago
    This is at best authoritarianism or corportatism not fascism. There is no ultranationalism, there is no "othering", there is no enforced hierarchy of individuals.
    • josefx 4y ago
      > There is no ultranationalism Wait for the next EU lawsuit against Google, you will drown under all the comments claiming it is an attack on American companies.
      • scarface74 4y ago
        We will probably just get another set of cookie pop ups that make the experience for everyone worse.
    • vetinari 4y ago
      There is cooperation between state and corporations for "greater good". There is "othering", see also "deplorables".
    • goodpoint 4y ago
      Wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism#Fascist_corporatism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism#Fascist_corporatis...
  • taylodl 4y ago
    You misspelled libertarianism
  • marginalia_nu 4y ago
    That doesn't really sound like fascism. Closer to feudalism than anything else.
  • ralusek 4y ago
    That's not what fascism is. Fascism is hyper nationalism where everything is done in service of the nation state. Private entities only exist insofar as they are extensions of the state. What you're describing here is more like a cyberpunk corporatocracy, where corporations hold so much power independent of the state, that they are able to exercise their own arbitrary decisions extrajudicially, while still maintaining so much power over people so as to completely control their lives. In fact, here you can see that the person was exonerated by the state but punished by the corporation. In fascism, nothing supercedes the state.
• chasil 4y ago
  The article mentions two independent instances of this process within Google, where appeal is not possible even with a police report that completely exonerates the suspect. It sounds to me as if a class action lawsuit is the most appropriate remedy for the unfortunates who are caught in this predicament. Their only problem is finding each other. For the rest of us, it is unwise to use cloud storage for photos, for several reasons.
  • bhedgeoser 4y ago
    • bhedgeoser 4y ago
      • dang 4y ago
        Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? You've been doing it a lot and we ban that sort of account because we're trying for a different sort of forum here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • judge2020 4y ago
    They don’t block CSAM because “it’s illegal” - in fact, they can’t be forced to do it without it breaking your 4th amendment rights. Instead, all CSAM reporting and blocking is done at-will by these companies, and some don’t participate (Apple[0]), so it’s a policy decision by these companies. I imagine unblocking someone due to them being exonerated by a government entity is legally risky - perhaps doing so would be considered enough proof/evidence to deem the entire CSAM scanning practice as a search/seizure at the request of the government. 0: https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/929-One-Bad-Apple.html https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/929-On... • “ According to NCMEC, I submitted 608 reports to NCMEC in 2019, and 523 reports in 2020. In those same years, Apple submitted 205 and 265 reports (respectively). It isn't that Apple doesn't receive more picture than my service, or that they don't have more CP than I receive. Rather, it's that they don't seem to notice and therefore, don't report.”
• Gatsky 4y ago
  What do you think is the ratio of innocent to nefarious pictures of naked children Google encounters in aggregate? This is relevant to how outraged one should be by this story. I think it is probably > 1:100000. As such, probably not much outrage is warranted, although it’s obviously not great for this one guy.
  • NoPie 4y ago
    Somehow I think there more parents who sometimes need to take a photo of their naked children than there are paedophiles. Or at least the ratio is clearly not 1:100000, maybe more like closer to 1:10. You would need statistics how many times google have reported police and how many times it have turned out to be a false alarm. Does google even keep record of false alarms? Most likely they don't to avoid responsibility.
    • quantified 4y ago
      I'd expect it to be a lot lower than 1:10. All parents have nude children at some point, they're sort of made that way. The number of pedophiles is higher than anyone wants it to be but it's not 1:10 the number of parents or they'd be a voting bloc. Probably 1:10000
  • Enginerrrd 4y ago
    Wow, I'd guess the opposite when we consider the base rate. Seems like a classic Bayesian problem. It's fairly normal for parents to take pictures of their children naked in the bathtub/at the beach/ camping/etc. Conversely, I'd expect actual pedophiles and CSAM producers to be really quite rare. So even a relatively low base-rate of normal parents with normal nude photos would likely dwarf CSAM upon detection. So, if we say 1/100 are pedophiles, and 30/100 are parents, and of the parents 10% have such photos, the ratio I'd expect without getting into detection rates is like 3:1 in favor of normal parents.
    • seszett 4y ago
      > It's fairly normal for parents to take pictures of their children naked in the bathtub/at the beach/ camping/etc. And what I understand is that each of these private photos of their children that parents take on an Android phone with Google cloud enabled gets specifically flagged to be shown to a stranger working for Google. That sounds pretty insane to me.
• vgatherps 4y ago
  What's the incentive for Google to EVER give the accounts back? If they wrongly deactivate an account (like here), you get a bad article, EFF and friends ruminate about your behavior, and the world mostly moves on. If Google wrongly gives an account back, you get a different article: "Google helped child pornographer even after discovering CP in their account". Now that gets attention. That's a scandal that leads to political action, criminal charges, etc. To be clear, I'm not advocating for how Google behaves. They're a lot more like a utility and probably should be treated like one (alongside the protections and requirements that come of a utility, you don't hear "eletric company stopped serving house since man suspect of CP lives there"). For the responses saying "Well the police cleared them", again I don't disagree. But if you're an executive making this decision you're thinking: 1. We never give back an account in this case and avoid the massive downside risk 2. We go through a lot of work to design a process that will impact a marginal portion of customers and really really hope nobody manages to social engineer themselves past, and pray that no enterprising news outlet/politician tries to make the "Google helped CP person recover their CP story" - they already have a target on their back.
  • zodiakzz 4y ago
    Employees of this office are very small and delicate, deserve protection from local pervs. Better a thousand innocent men are locked up than one guilty man roam free. — Dwight K. Schrute
  • christophilus 4y ago
    If due process was followed, and the police / state exonerated the parents, I don’t think anyone would blame Google for reactivating the accounts. They’d blame the police or whatever flawed exoneration process was used. At least, that’s what I’d hope. Google here looks even worse than I thought possible, and I’m a de-Googled, anti-fan, so I already had a very dim view of them.
    • salawat 4y ago
      What's this exonerated? They didn't do anything. Investigation/State scrutiny shouldn't be considered an act of guilt that requires a vouchsafing.
• saagarjha 4y ago
  I’m amused because it’s a microcosm of the actual problem: it’s probably the default response to anything that has to do with child sexual abuse material, given without thought to context or circumstances, with too little review. But hey, I guess it’s Google’s official position that this dad is a child pornographer ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
• prepend 4y ago
  I suppose it’s defensive behavior. If they admit their mistake now then they could potentially be liable for the damages caused by their mistake years ago. Now any lawsuit would need to determine if there was an error and harm instead of just quantifying the harm. I’d like to contribute to a crowdsource fund to prosecute cases like this. When I was a kid the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund [0] was set up to pay for lawyers to defend comic book stores that were being targeted by over eager police departments and civil suits. Maybe something like the Google is an Asshole Legal Defense Fund could collect donations. The article mentions $7000 as the cost to prosecute this persons case. Crowdsourcing can help with that. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_Book_Legal_Defense_Fund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_Book_Legal_Defense_Fund
  • sandworm101 4y ago
    7000$ is a pitance. Maybe this case is simple, but many will not be. Say they raid a house and confiscate a hard drive. Encrypted or not, that is going to be a huge thing. Arguments will be made about whether anything incriminating was stored on that drive. Just google the cost of a forensic expert witness. Both sides will need one. Such costs are actually why so many police agencies are backing off of CP investigations. They still prosecute where evidence is clear, such as when someone emails such material openly, but they arent willing to invest the tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars necessary to handle the complex cases involving encrypted communication/storage. 7000$ would be a bare minimum for only the simplest of legal defenses in the simplest of cases.
    • happyopossum 4y ago
      The reference to $7k isn’t to prosecute a CP case, it was to sue google to reinstate his account so he could get his digital life back.
      • sandworm101 4y ago
        Which would involve defending his case. The defense's budget has to be in 5he same league as the prosecution.
• zelphirkalt 4y ago
  > Just how tone deaf can Google be, continuing to treat these innocent folks as criminals in this passive aggressive statement even after being proven wrong? Do these people have no empathy at all? They don't care a single bit about the effect their actions have on others. They only care about having to build a system, which can distinguish such cases from actually criminal ones. Because that wouldn't scale and would be bad for business $$$. So they try to turn and twist the image in the light of the public, that it is "right" what they did, so that the public does not cry out and demand change of their systems. Empathy doesn't even enter the equation for Google.
  • shadowgovt 4y ago
    > They only care about having to build a system, which can distinguish such cases from actually criminal ones There are only two ways to actually do that: 1) Make Google's policies 100% subservient to the United States legal system, which would look a lot like the "corporate / national lock-step unity" one sees in actual fascism 2) Google build its own court system, independent from the United States court system but with equivalent power Are either of those scenarios desirable?
    • zelphirkalt 4y ago
      How about just saying in hindsight: "Hey, we were wrong! [Yes, it's possible! The allmighty Google can be wrong! Newsflash!] We are sorry, these things happen with our automated systems. Person XYZ is completely not guilty of our accusations and we will revert all actions taken from our side. It is in the nature of things, that these cases are difficult to distinguish, without information about the child as well as the parent and we need to stay vigilant about pictures of children being uploaded to our services. Please accept our apologies." Instead of going: "Nooo! We were still right! We don't care what others say or what facts were found out!" So I am thinking you are painting the scenario a bit wrong here, saying, that there are only 2 options. An honest apology and actions to make up for ones mistakes can go a long way. Of course I would not expect Google to act that way.
• omgrusrs 4y ago
• zaroth 4y ago
  I’m more and more convinced that they just never bothered to write the ban-hammer feature in a way that it is actually reversible. Probably the button simply doesn’t exist to undo the termination 30/60/90 days later. Good luck getting them to admit it.
• userbinator 4y ago
  even though law enforcement cleared the two men I've said it before and I'll say it again: Google now has enough power that it has effectively turned into a globalist government, a government you did not vote for.
• hedora 4y ago
  > In a statement, Google said, “Child sexual abuse material is abhorrent I love the use of the disclaimer "sexual" here, to make it clear they don't care about other types of child abuse (like interfering with access to health care, which Google is clearly guilty of in this case...) Well crafted weasel words, PR folks!
• shrimpx 4y ago
  I wonder why the person decided 7k was not worth the lawsuit. Their legal counsel told them it was hopeless to win anything?