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Google refuses to reinstate account after man took medical images of son’s groin

• deleted 4y ago
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• Proven 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
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• stirlo 4y ago
  I can't believe the response after the media approaching them was still "We're right and your account remains banned" I understand the reluctance to expose themselves to potential legal complications but in this case with the police report it's pretty clear cut that these photos were not criminal and the photo taker has not committed the crime Google is accusing him of. further discussion on the original NYT story here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32538805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32538805
  • Gigachad 4y ago
    It seems like a problem that requires legal change. Right now Google is fully entitled to nuke the persons email and phone number, completely locking them out of their life. And they can do this for any reason without any recourse. Once you reach the scale and importance of these services, it shouldn’t be legal to lock people out like this.
    • JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > a problem that requires legal change Playing devil’s advocate, possession of CP is criminal with absolute liability [1]. Deleting someone’s account, far from it. (Civil. Maybe.) Weighing someone who might have CP, even to an absurdly low probability, against them being suing and like two people deleting their Gmail accounts, I can see how someone chose the former. If they got the call wrong, Google would not only be liable for damages, the individuals involved could be criminally charged. I’m assuming everyone in this chain would appreciate laws clarifying an email bill of rights. On the other hand, Google made their bed with its surveillance-first culture. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_liability https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_liability
      • sverhagen 4y ago
        You are playing devil's advocate against the current legal situation. I don't agree, but fine. But you're responding to the suggestion to make a legal change, this legal change presumably would put a liability on these kinds of false positives too. One of the two could still have stiffer sanctions, and cause Google to prefer the other, but the idea is at least that this choice wouldn't be that obvious anymore.
        • JumpCrisscross 4y ago
          I agree with you. I’m arguing one could likely get Google to back a reasonable proposal.
      • baybal2 4y ago
      • ClumsyPilot 4y ago
        > they got the call wrong, Google would not only be liable for damages, the individuals involved could be criminally charged. So how come this has never happened? Google and Facebook have existed for decades, and so has CP, they didn't have automatic detection untill decently and yet none of their employees have ever been charged.
    • egwor 4y ago
      I wonder whether the man could sue Google for defamation because they've asserted that he's done something and taken an action as a result of that. As a result they're defaming him. I'm not a lawyer and definitely not sure of US law. It'd be interesting to hear a real lawyer consider this.
    • pakitan 4y ago
      It does require legal change but not the one you're implying. I love how the conversation moved from the initial outrage of "they're scanning my private images!" to "ok, they are scanning my images but I need to have a legal recourse to get my accounts back in case I'm banned improperly". There is no good excuse for this kind of spying apparatus, period. If anything, having a mandated formal process for reinstating banned accounts will make the scanning more acceptable, which it shouldn't be. "You see, yes, we're regularly checking out your dick pics but it's all good, we have a process in place and if we tag an image as CP, when it's not, you'll eventually be exonerated. No harm done"
      • bambax 4y ago
        I would agree with you, except for this which goes too far IMHO: > If anything, having a mandated formal process for reinstating banned accounts will make the scanning more acceptable, which it shouldn't be. We should fight first for a proper legal recourse, and once this happens, then we can also fight for no scanning.
        • tresqotheq 4y ago
          >We should fight first for a proper legal recourse It does not matter, because we don't have any fight left in us at all..
          • reitanqild 4y ago
            Speak for yourself. I'm more than prepared to just stop working for a few days or even a week or two. I already actively boycott Chinese products where possible (I buy non Chinese if at all possible, even at significant higher prices), support the Georgian Legion with my own cash and have probably spent hundreds of hours on unpaid online activism this half year on top of what I do for my church (although in all fairness it still does more for me). If enough people band together and just plain stop working, sooner or later politicians will have to listen.
        • melff 4y ago
          Why? Why should be fight for legal recourse first before we tackle the real problem? (At least in this context, legal recourse for unwarranted service termination can also be useful for things unrelated to scanning of private data, but that's not the point) This sounds like the "step back" in the "two steps forward, one step backwards" ideom.
    • darkhelmet 4y ago
      Companies like Google rely heavily on AI and automation and keep humans out of the loop to the extent possible. Once the models detect these sort of photos, they won't be stopping. If they don't add a permanent exception then the AI would flag it on the next pass and repeat the process. Google certainly won't be retraining the models to learn to exclude "but not photos for doctors". Having humans going through and flagging accounts (or photos) for exceptions will ruin the economies of scale. This can't keep going on like this. To somebody like Google, an account might just be a profit source, but to the affected people it can be their lives or livelihood. The issue of right of redress really needs to be forced, legislatively.
    • rlpb 4y ago
      I think companies that have sufficiently significant market capture should be laden with a "universal service obligation" as an antitrust-type measure. They shouldn't be able to refuse service unless they can prove the customer is doing something illegal. If they do refuse service, the customer should have grounds to sue them to restore service. This might go against some people's idea of a free market. I think it should only apply where there isn't a free market - when a customer doesn't have many other options, such as in the case of Google or Apple, or Visa/Mastercard, a major supermarket, or the choice of cellphone provider or Internet provider in markets where there are only a few options. It wouldn't apply to small independent traders by definition. Capture enough of the market where there isn't enough competition and you get obligations to treat them fairly.
  • jbverschoor 4y ago
    If they’re not right, but they deleted his data, they may have a bigger problem
    • Sunspark 4y ago
      Why? Isn't it always part of a TOS that you have no rights and that the company can do whatever they like anytime they like?
      • jbverschoor 4y ago
        Contracts or terms don't have to be legal
      • Charlie_26 4y ago
        Surely a GDPR violation at the very least
        • Freak_NL 4y ago
          He could probably still get his data as a data dump if he was European, just not his accounts reinstated. As Mark is apparently an American citizen though, the GDPR does not apply.
          • Sunspark 4y ago
            Does anyone know what happens if one is a European citizen (or dual-citizen with the US) but physically resident in the US? Can one invoke EU rights, or is it tied to being physically resident like a DVD region? What if the EU citizen flies to Europe? Can they then invoke their right from the physical territory of Europe? I feel this is somewhat uncharted water.
  • rustybolt 4y ago
    It sounds more like they say "We're wrong and your account remains banned."
    • notch656a 4y ago
      How could they conceivably even look at the data to unban the account though? That shit's radioactive, as soon as the AI flags it I don't know how a (non-LEO) human could possibly view it without running afoul of the law. There's no reasonable way to reverse this action.
      • jacquesm 4y ago
        Non LEO are routinely employed by companies like Google, Facebook etc to review content. It's the most thankless job in the world.
        • notch656a 4y ago
          I don't think it's legal for those people to view it though if they have reason to believe it contains certain images of child abuse. Once the AI flags it that shit goes radioactive and is basically unviewable until LEO looks at it. Even if local LEO looks at it and clears it, that doesn't clear you from being federally prosecuted if you review the content later.
          • jacquesm 4y ago
            Here is how it worked when I ran a file sharing service: - We would allow people to upload files - these files would go into a 'holding tank' - the files would then get greenlit if some rudimentary algorithm determined they were landscapes or other innocent content - the remainder would be flagged for review - bulk images would be displayed in a grid of 8x8 thumbnails - the vast majority of those would not be reason for further action and would be greenlit, the remainder would go into yet another holding tank - now the pictures would be viewed full size, any kind of image that would be against the TOS would be rejected and a hash would be kept to avoid seeing it again - any kind of image that was deemed illegal or borderline would be passed on to LEO for another decision, possibly resulting in criminal charges against the uploader. The complications: - uploaders would try to mask their identity - uploaders would be all over the world - even after reviewing LEO would sometimes indicate that an image was inconclusive (in those cases we erred on the side of caution) -- In short: companies can and do work together with law enforcement to stop service abuse and illegal activities. Whether it is an AI that flags it or a human is from a legal perspective utterly immaterial, and if LEO clears it that definitely means that you are allowed to either view it or pass it on.
  • elp 4y ago
    I've got a question for the lawyers here. These photos were for communication with a medical professional. Can't the argument be made that this was a HIPAA violation? Isn't this grounds for an entire whale of a class action lawsuit ?
    • kvdveer 4y ago
      HIPAA specifies how medical professionals should handle patient information. None of the parties in this dispute are medical professionals, so HIPAA does not apply.
    • tux3 4y ago
      IANAL, but my understanding is HIPAA applies to covered entities, i.e. medical professionals. Google can use the defense that somewhere in the TOS it probably says you agree to share everything with them when it goes to cloud storage. HIPAA doesn't prohibit people from sharing info about themselves (even accidentally). Though it does probibits your doctor from putting photos like this near Google anything.
    • altano 4y ago
      No. Google Photos under a personal Google account is not HIPAA compliant and doesn't claim to be.
    • ccrush 4y ago
      I guarantee that the doctor has a HIPAA agreement that you sign when you agree to communicate over email that says that you grant him the right to share the files with Business Associates, and that their email providers are considered Business Associates for the purpose of transmitting ePHI.
  • dalbasal 4y ago
    In a way, I'm actually glad this is the case. The "blue check fix" minimizes negative publicity while doing nothing for 99% of people. If a bad policy is consistently applied, at least it can be understood and criticised.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • londons_explore 4y ago
    Google has a policy that they delete permanently the contents of any account that has been suspended for 30 days or more. They do this to comply with European GDPR regulations (which require they not hold any data they no longer have the users permission to store, nor have ongoing legitimate interest in), and they have written it into their own privacy policies. Therefore, this account and all the data contained is already gone. The most they could do is allow him to create a new account with the same name, but to my knowledge that isn't supported technically in their systems (too many bugs to be found by re-using unique identifiers). That's why they stand by their decision - they don't have the capability to implement any other option.
    • trwaway02 4y ago
      > They do this to comply with European GDPR regulations In this case, they actually satisfy the two requirements: 1. "ongoing legitimate interest". They are still in a dispute with the customer. Deactivating an account does not require deleting data, so long as the case it not closed. There is no "30 day" limit in this case, and it seems like an arbitrary time period imposed by someone who hasn't thought of the consequences. 2. "users permission". In this case they do have the user permission to keep the content, because the user wants to keep access to the account. > they don't have the capability to implement any other option. As mentioned above, you can deactivate an account without also deleting it. It may of course be easier for Google to just delete it instead of introducing a new state, but I would argue that a company such as Google does have the capability to implement this option. I would go so far as to say this is a failure of Google to not have such a process in place.
      • londons_explore 4y ago
        Unfortunately, when they deactivate the account, they lose any ability to communicate with the customer. Anyone who emails claiming to be the customer may or may not be the same person. That works both ways - as well as not being able to get the customers permission to keep the data, they also would not be able to get the customers request to delete the data if they were to keep it 'just in case'. Until they have built some functionality to communicate with the customer behind a suspended account, they have to delete the data within 30 days.
• franczesko 4y ago
  Email account deletion and recovery should be regulated by law. Nowadays it's an essential service - just imagine that electricity provider, ISP or anyone else is doing the same without any period of notice, nor ability to dispute the problem with a company's representative.
  • morninglight 4y ago
    This is the most reasoned and constructive response that this event has produced. I hope your suggestion gets some political/legal traction.
    • 9991 4y ago
      Poppycock, it’s just communism with extra steps. Google’s email server is not your email server just because you’ve come to depend on it. If you want your own server, build your own server.
      • EMIRELADERO 4y ago
        How far does that argument go? "$ELECTRICITY_COMPANY's power is not your power just because you've come to depend on it. If you want your own electricity, build your own infrastructure". Granted, most people here on HN would be able to deploy their own, but you can't ask that of the average citizen who just needs email.
        • dymk 4y ago
          I would hazard a guess that nobody on this forum has an alternate electric company they can go to. But there's dozens of search engines, and thousands of email providers that users can choose from, all competing for your business.
          • EMIRELADERO 4y ago
            Again, you know that, I know that, will your average non-techie person know that? This also isn't only about email. Their entire data was on the account.
• checker659 4y ago
  Isn't a father allowed to take photos of his son's groin even for non medical reasons?
  • denkmoon 4y ago
    Hoooo boy. You obviously aren't familiar with American Puritanism.
    • lincheomang 4y ago
      When I watch American culture on TV channel, it is always fat African-American lady talking about their private parts and shaking ass. Where can I watch American Puritanism?
      • calculatte 4y ago
        What they put on TV is not American culture. That is programming, in multiple senses of the word.
      • denkmoon 4y ago
        Try Fox News. Btw, very nice of you to create a fresh new account _just_ to reply with a strawman to my post :)
        • deleted 4y ago
          [deleted]
    • aulin 4y ago
      do these rules and automatic flagging only apply to US citizens?
  • 988747 4y ago
    Well, taking a photo of just the groin, for non-medical reasons would be kind of weird. Taking a photo of the whole baby, e.g. in bath is perfectly normal, even if it also shows the groin.
• deepdriver 4y ago
  To how many parents has this already happened? I get the feeling "Mark" who lives in SF probably knows folks in media or tech. How many nameless, powerless people in Middle America or the Global South had their digital lives nuked and suffered in silence?
  • Gigachad 4y ago
    There was a link here a few months ago about a stranger getting access to someones wifi, doing some illegal stuff and then the police come and seize all of the wifi owners devices for several months resulting in them losing their job as a teacher, access to everything and having to go through a very difficult process to sort everything out. Even if you eventually resolve things, its a life ruining event to even have to go through this process.
  • ThalesX 4y ago
    My dad ran for mayor in a small town. The opposition kept flagging our (I was a sort of campaign manager) posts as being nazi propaganda (hint: it wasn’t). They did this until my dad’s account got banned. There was no way I could recover his account after this. Ultimately he just created a new account, with reversed first and last name and the same profile picture which seems to have fooled the almighty AI.
    • dannyw 4y ago
      I've had an ex get banned (still banned) from Facebook's suite of products for supposed extremist or terrorism materials. She suspect that a former Meta employee she dated and ended up bad terms may have something to do with it, but all the normal appeal channels end nowhere and I don't know any Facebook employees. It was however, trivial for her to make a new account.
      • hardware2win 4y ago
        Would people risk their 200k jobs for stupid revenge like that?
• dybber 4y ago
  It’s quick and easy to move from Gmail to Fastmail. Did it earlier this year. Now YouTube is the only Google product I use, and it works pretty well without an account.
  • kragen 4y ago
    Works better with NewPipe.
  • gspr 4y ago
    Honest question: can one (reasonably) use an Android phone without a Google account? If not, should one just accept losing access to half the phone market? What if Apple decides to pull a similar move? In many places, you need a phone from one of those two providers in order to do mundane things like riding the subway without having to jump through extra hoops.
    • googl-free 4y ago
      You can use several google-free AOSP builds. GrapheneOS is great. You lose the ability to use a few apps like uber/lyft, but you should also know how to navigate cities without those apps.
      • Freak_NL 4y ago
        I'm impressed by GrapheneOS. Only when you need apps from the Play Store will you need a Google account. As long as anything you get there is free and easy to reinstate if you lose your Google account, that's not much of a risk. For navigation without transportation, OsmAnd and OrganicMaps (both OpenStreetMap) often do quite well.
        • melff 4y ago
          You can use "Aurora Store" to download apps without a google account, I use that on lineageOS
          • 4y ago
• timbofoo 4y ago
  Stop giving Google control of one of if not the most important communications identity in your life. I know gmail is cheap and easy, but theres a reason for that: you're giving up so much.
  • Gigachad 4y ago
    This is like staying you should stop trusting the supermarket to not poison your food and to instead trust the smaller supermarket to not do it or to just grow your own food. It’s not practical to not trust anyone and maintain a functional life. The real insight should be at regulating tech companies so they can’t do this anymore. Email is a utility and should be regulated like one. The power company can’t just shut your house off because you tweeted something bad but for some reason tech companies can do effectively this.
    • throwaway290 4y ago
      > This is like staying you should stop trusting the supermarket to not poison your food and to instead trust the smaller supermarket to not do it or to just grow your own food. More like, have alternatives ready and know what to do to avoid downtime if your main supermarket randomly permabans you for accidentally losing a receipt between purchase and exit, or having unaccounted for bottle of coke in your backpack that you bought at another store, or just looking sus. Or yes maybe it's found to be poisoning food. Fairly reasonable to be prepared. > Email is a utility and should be regulated like one. I want less barriers to operating my own email if I want it, having to get a license and such is the opposite of the goal. Maybe that's not what you mean though. Generally regulating anything is a tradeoff. It helps established monopolies and prevents competition.
      • tsimionescu 4y ago
        > Generally regulating anything is a tradeoff. It helps established monopolies and prevents competition. How is this relevant when discussing Gmail of all things? When was the last time they had an actual competitor with some market share (outside corporate email), Yahoo! Mail?
• Maro 4y ago
  "Mark was cleared of any criminal wrongdoing, but Google has said it will stand by its decision." Can someone explain what Google's logic is? At this point [after the news articles], clearly humans are involved at Google, clearly they know this is not child porn, so why not reinstate the account and move on?
  • barkingcat 4y ago
    corporate rigidity and lack of monetary incentive to reinstate the account
  • int_19h 4y ago
    It's quite likely that their lawyers have concluded that if they do reinstate the account, and some nutjob somewhere claims that they're covering up for actual child abuse, the reputation loss is going to be higher still. Basically, CSAM is too radioactive for common sense.
    • gman83 4y ago
      Also, in the U.S. there seem to be an extremely large number of people who accuse their political opponents of being child abusers, so that might make sense for Google from a purely strategic perspective.
      • ChuckNorris89 4y ago
        What's even sadder for us across the pond is that this US oversensitivity to any kind of nudity and desire to censor it for political and religious reasons, is spreading here though tech companies enacting their crazy US policies across the world. "But a kid seeing a nipple isn't illegal here" "Doesn't matter, it's illegal in 'Merica, so to simplify things, it's now illegal wherever Google operates " I guess it's payback for the EU cookies banners. /s
        • melff 4y ago
          This kind of stuff is one reason why it should be illegal for platforms to censor at will, it should be possible to sue them for censoring stuff they shouldn't be censoring just as it is for not censoring stuff they should be censoring. No matter how much they like to say they are fReEEeE pRiVAte eNTErpRiSes, they provide de-facto public spaces(public as in accessible to the broad public, not as in government-run) and should be treated as such. They shouldn't have the power to be legislative and judiciary of public communication.
• rustybolt 4y ago
  > “We follow US law in defining what constitutes CSAM and use a combination of hash matching technology and artificial intelligence to identify it and remove it from our platforms,” said Christa Muldoon, a Google spokesperson. > Muldoon added that Google staffers who review CSAM were trained by medical experts to look for rashes or other issues. They themselves, however, were not medical experts and medical experts were not consulted when reviewing each case, she said. Which is a nice way of saying: "AI flagged the pictures, we can't really judge if they are medical pictures or not. Enjoy your permaban!" Besides, permabanning someone because of a single flagged picture seems like a dumb policy anyway. Even if there was no rash or inflammation in the picture, the child could have had a pain in the groin, so wanting to visually examine it could make sense for a doctor.
• awb 4y ago
  Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32538805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32538805 Another version of this same story, also marked as a dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32557294 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32557294
• GoOnThenDoTell 4y ago
  Time to move out of gmail
• iamleppert 4y ago
  It’s stated clearly in the ToS Google will not stand for explicit images of a child. Google reserves the right to punish those who break the rules. It may not seem fair but it’s not worth the risk, it’s easier to just delete the user’s account and move on to the next user. As a user, there is a dispute process but as a user I must obey the ToS if I don’t want my account to be deleted. If someone came into your place of business and began taking explicit photos of their child, for medical or any other reason, would you stand for it? Would you give them a second chance to explain themselves? Google’s place of business is whatever you do on your phone and any content generated by it. You don’t own Android OS just by buying a phone the same way you don’t own a pizza shop just by buying a slice of pizza there.
  • afandian 4y ago
    Maybe they should shout a bit louder about the “this is not fit for any particular purpose “. Not buried as some legalese boilerplate in the EULA but on the signup page in big letters.
    • JetAlone 4y ago
      Yeah. And there should be many comparable alternative businesses that do sell communication devices that don't opaquely Zucc legal albeit questionable content. The people who play apologetics for this and think this sort of service is in any way comparable to pizza have every right to keep hanging out in their auto-modded environment eating their thin crust diavolo, swiping their oily fingers all over their device's controls, as long as there's a reasonable habitat for the rest of us.
    • charcircuit 4y ago
      It should be common sense to avoid creating pictures of naked kids. Especially ones that focus on their groins.
      • jacquesm 4y ago
        Except of course that for non in-person medical consultations (which are becoming more and more the norm) it may be unavoidable to do so.
• Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y ago
  To stay on topic, I'm a parent and have autoupload to google photos. How can I prevent the photo from bring uploaded? I could disable autoupload, but as soon as I resume it, the photo will be uploaded, unless I remove it from the phone. Any suggestions?
  • 20after4 4y ago
    don't use google photos at all. And probably don't have pictures that are even remotely questionable on your phone, even if it's for legitimate reasons.
    • Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y ago
      That overlooks the reality of life. To many people, smartphones are the only camera they have.
      • Freak_NL 4y ago
        That's fine, and it sucks that often there is not really a choice in which camera software to use either. It doesn't help that by choosing Android or IOS you almost inevitably get hooked into the clouds of Google and Apple. I deliberately bought a Pixel 6 in order to install GrapheneOS (a degoogled Android) and leave out all links to Google except for the Play store for a handful of apps pushed by governments and banks. The built-in camera app works fine, and OpenCamera is a great alternative too now that it supports all cameras of the Pixel 6.
        • caeril 4y ago
          This is the correct answer. Use GrapheneOS and synchronize your photos to your NAS. Nobody needs to use Google or Apple "cloud" for photos.
  • sudhirj 4y ago
    Turn off Google's auto upload. The entire photos thing has long been a way to get images to train ML, and since they actively use these images you're not in a position of power here. i.e. you're doing Google a favour by using the auto-upload. Either find a service that you're paying for, or if you want to trust a big corp maybe go with Apple. Not perfect, but best of the lot from what I can see. All of the logic is on-device, so they're less inclined to peek at your photos. There was a big hubbub a while ago when they tried to do unsafe photo detection on-device, but they backtracked.
• paganel 4y ago
  I've grown up to believe that we deserve this, at a societal level. As long as we've let technology invade each and every inch of our private space this was bound to happen, sooner or later. Props though to the SF police which has stopped the investigation when, I guess automatically, they had been made aware of the whole thing by Google. I suspect in a few years' time that won't be the case anymore, even the Police investigation in this sort of cases will have become "automated".
• rollulus 4y ago
  With Google representing all branches of a shadow trias politica is like a secret police in totalitarian countries. If thanks to this news on Google's move only one person decides _not_ to send pictures on their doctors request, then this action has sent out the same message as the secret police making your neighbours disappear after saying something unfriendly about the dictator.
• hyperman1 4y ago
  Plenty of facets on this one, and I fear they all require changing and enforcing legislation and to fix them. * Google provides a good product free of charge to everybody, but claims it can withdraw the offer to anyone with no notice and without giving any reason. The law should require more rights, guarantees and due process even for free service providers. At minimum, the right to recover my data, the right to have some time to fix the problem, the right to have everyone following the same rules, knowing the rules and knowing the exact violation, and some basic warrantees. As a parallel: Malls are open for everyone just like Google, and it still doesn't allow them to ban people at random. The USA learned with black people how quickly this becomes ugly. But a mall still can remove customers too troubling, the cops can be called, and both mall and customer can sue if it is really worth it. * People should pay (and be able to pay) for a product that is worth it. The services provided by Google are easily worth money. * It's hard to ban anyone on the internet without a stable identity, government provided or not. People just take a new identity and come back. This is especially sensitive in the USA, but it causes all kinds of trouble. Maybe coupling the ID to a payment is an alternative, so you can get a new ID if you pay for it. €10 /id / year would probably be enough to shut out almost every troublemaker, and the law can deal with what's left. * The child porn laws are insane and should be changed. It is not normal that you can send a picture to someone, and the law requires the receiver should go to jail even without him knowing anything happened. Under such laws, the google 'scorched earth' policy is the only option they have. * EULAs need to cease existing. If I buy an Andriod phone, I give money to the manufacturer, the manufacturer gives money to Google. That means I should have a right to access google play etc without all kinds of EULAs making the device I bought non-functional on any whim from Google. Just paying should be enough. It used to be that license agreements existed only between companies, and were deemed too complicated for ordinary consumers. The 'End User' aspect has to die off. Normal copyright will still protect the software just as it does with books and DVDs, so there really is no need.
  • ec109685 4y ago
    In this person’s case, they were paying Google for their Android phone and Google FI phone service, so it wasn’t even a free product they got banned from. Also, see Apple’s scanning stance. Google isn’t obligated to scan and report to law enforcement.
• Sweepi 4y ago
  https://youtu.be/sVxJ016xb4Q https://youtu.be/sVxJ016xb4Q
• chucky123 4y ago
  Yes, good. Push this to the mainstream. Hopefully something good comes out of this.
• nomilk 4y ago
  Two unintended consequences - Patients find it too risky to store medical information on Google drives/devices. - Exhausted patients are forced to scrutinise every upload for the potential for Google to mistakenly perceive a breach of TOS. This is not good for the world.
  • shapefrog 4y ago
    I see both of those consequences as a win for the world and humanity in general.
• dalbasal 4y ago
  I was reminded of David Graeber's description of banking bureaucracies, as I read this. At ground level, bank employees blame irrational form filling, small and nonsensical process requirements on "regulation." In reality, they are implementing a bank "compliance" policy that is relates to regulation. That way, neither the regulator nor the bank is culpable... either for solving the problem or for consequences of the solution. Meanwhile, the banks themselves probably lobbied for the regulation specifics, and almost certainly wrote large parts of it themselves. It's cozy. At Google-scale, there is no dividing line between between private & government bureaucracies. They're merged in a way that evolves to deflect criticism & responsibility from both. The scariest line, to me, was this: "These companies have access to a tremendously invasive amount of data about people’s lives. And still they don’t have the context of what people’s lives actually are." Well... "luckily" Google & such are getting better all the time at "context." The response to such issues is usually to deepen the bureaucracies, not to pull back.
• ComodoHacker 4y ago
  Is there any source in which countries this Google CSAM scanning works?
  • ur-whale 4y ago
    > in which countries What are those "countries" you speak of? Do you mean where the user resides? Do you mean where the data is stored? Do you mean where Google is incorporated? Do any of these "countries" matter when it is a corporation with a country-sized budget on the left side of the ring?
    • ComodoHacker 4y ago
      I mean where the user resides and which law is applicable. In case of Android it means where the phone number is registered.
  • tsimionescu 4y ago
    I would be shocked if it's not universal. They could be sued in the USA for storing CSAM in any other country, even if that country happens not to recognize this as CSAM.
• Maro 4y ago
  As a parent, I feel for this fellow parent. About 10 days ago, my 3 year old son developed Bell's palsy in a period of 24 hours. This means the right side of his face became paralyzed, for no good/known reason. Most cases of Bell's palsy, esp. with toddlers, go away within about a month. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_palsy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_palsy I'm taking videos of his face every day to track progress, to see whether it's recovering. Also, I'm sharing some of the videos on a Messenger chat with other concerned family members. Obviously, since this is his face, I'm not in danger of violating any TOS on this. I have Google Photos auto-upload turned on. But, knowing how stressed I was when this started, I was definitely not thinking about Google's (or Facebook's) TOS when I was making the videos, so if it had been some other condition where the affected area was the groin, like in the article, I'm pretty sure I would not have realized I'm risking my entire online presence. Some good news to close: my son's face is showing good movement after ~10 days, so I think he'll recover within a month.
  • mikro2nd 4y ago
    If you're so stressed about it, why don't you turn off auto-upload? Why don't you use something other than Google Photos? If you have a genuine requirement for photo sharing -- to share your shild's photos with their doctor, say -- there are plenty of other ways to do that. It's not like you're some captive hostage to Google here. eta: I do wish your child wellness and a speedy recovery! eta2: To the downvoters: Go for it - I can afford the decrementing of a number in someone else's computer. But. This was not an attack on the parent. Answer the damn questions!
    • Maro 4y ago
      I wasn't stressed about the auto-upload. I was stressed because half my baby's face went paralyzed. The fact that the pics/videos get auto-uploaded and Google scans them didn't occur to me until I read the OP.
  • lostlogin 4y ago
    Videos and photos of kids faces must be a meaningful percentage of all images taken on phones, surely?
• neverrroot 4y ago
  Evil is as evil does.
• ur-whale 4y ago
  If, witnessing the kind of power Google wields unchecked, you haven't - at the very least - taken steps to regularly pull all of your data out of Google, because, oh, this kind of stuff just won't happen to me ... please reconsider.
• mro_name 4y ago
  This is why in civilised societies there is no vigilante justice, but courts and lawyers. This is inconvenient, but unavoidable.
• rossmohax 4y ago
  At this point of publicity unban need to come with some "we are changing our policies" promise, which they are not willing to do maybe?
• dariosalvi78 4y ago
  I've been a happy Google photos user for a few years but the fact that they have changed their business model from "free forever" to "now you pay", and the fact that photos take half of my Google free tier, and this scary stuff about CSAM I think the time has come for self-hosting everything. I will wait a bit for email (too complicated), but as for pictures, any software you would recommend? Ideally, the server should run on a Raspberry Pi and has face recognition and automatic tagging.
  • Charlie_26 4y ago
    https://photoprism.app/ https://photoprism.app/. I don’t work for these guys. I heard good things
  • Freak_NL 4y ago
    At this point it seems that anything but client-side encrypted backups is a liability. Although I guess there is a sizeable group of knuckleheads who would like to ban the notion of client-side encrypted backups just as much as they want to ban end-to-end encrypted messaging — as soon as they learn such a thing exists.
  • dirtyid 4y ago
    It doesn't help even if you pay. I have Google One account for in person Google support in case shit hits fan. Shit hits fan, for some reason my youtube account with premium gets banned for scams, despite account only ever used for viewing. So I make another one with premium that got banned a couple months later, again account only used for viewing. The kicker, once they ban your account, you are denied from subscription page and cannot CANCEL premium sub. And you can only appeal decision every two weeks which so far has been automatically rejected after a couple hours. Meanwhile I contact Google One who helpfully forwarded issue to YT team, and their response "we're not equipped to deal with this issue". Current in the process of taking out my entire account data so I can cancel credit card attached to Google services, hoping it would kill the premium charges without getting the rest of my data wiped. Or all my playstore purchases. Utterly absurd situation. Pretty sure it's fraud, but there's one useful to resolve situation, even in person.
  • 4y ago
• AndrewThrowaway 4y ago
  Cyberpunk dystopia realized. It is not so hard to imagine a near future where corporations have much more power than states. Imagine you do something like this in the near future. You are banned from all communications. Alpha corp. reports it to VISA corp. and all your money is confiscated. State can't help you as you do not have a way to communicate with it, don't have a way to start any legal process as you do not have a way to pay. All your daily subscriptions to housing, mobility, entertainment are cancelled and you are homeless the same day. The only way for you to stay alive is to hike to lawless desert city of "Kowloon 2.1". You walk by the highways observing huge OLED billboards. They show presidential elections. This time it is some adult TV reality show star competing with tanned bodybuilder.
  • bioinformatics 4y ago
    People here in this forum have enabled it, are enabling it and will continue to enable it. HN only have itself to blame when this happens.
  • dannyw 4y ago
    If both Visa and Mastercard refuse to deal with you, you are basically screwed in today's world.
    • AndrewThrowaway 4y ago
      And then you have articles like this: https://sweden.se/life/society/a-cashless-society https://sweden.se/life/society/a-cashless-society Where I am really not sure how to feel about it.
      • noduerme 4y ago
        • AussieWog93 4y ago
          >Children should see pornography and taste alcohol as early as possible. Sometimes I'm glad that "idiots" are in charge of things, rather than reckless intellectuals.
• ls15 4y ago
  The right to medical privacy should weigh much more than Google's right to spy on communication between you and your doctor.
  • dest 4y ago
    For private medical communication, one should not use Google services. Those are just incompatible. I'd say the same for communication in general, if possible, but using Android without Google is difficult for the average user.
• mytailorisrich 4y ago
  I have a suspicion that this is because their systems will still scan this guys' pictures and will still trip on this or another picture, and they can't or don't want to disable checks on his account... so that their conclusion is "fuck it, it's easier to keep him banned".
• biohacker85 4y ago
  • Charlie_26 4y ago
    No way in hell I’m clicking that lmfao
• ElCheapo 4y ago
  TIL: upload child porn on a secret website, take someone's device, send said image and delete the chat, get his account banned with no possibility of reversal. Thank God for AI, planting evidence and automatically ruining someone's livelyhood has never been so algorithmically efficient!
  • hardware2win 4y ago
    >take someone's device Interesting attack vector!
    • ElCheapo 4y ago
      Unlike your banking website or other critical software, if you find an unlocked phone there are no barriers put in place to make sure it's really you who wants to send a text message. I don't think those barriers should be there, but if anyone can potentially send a text message on my behalf then you can't automatically ban people with no investigation or ability to appeal somewhere.
• akmarinov 4y ago
  Hey, remember when Apple was going to implement photo matching against known CSAM and everyone freaked out, prompting them to reverse the decision? Well, this is Google having an AI classify your images as potential CSAM and having had that for a while and everyone’s cool with it.
  • progre 4y ago
    It's not quite the same though. These images where uploaded to Google, they are required by law to not host child porn, so of course they are going to classify the images. The Apple thing was them proposing to run the classification on your phone. On personal, not uploaded anyware, images. People felt that was crossing a line.
    • ec109685 4y ago
      Google isn’t obligated to scan private photos on their cloud for csam. Apple doesn’t for example. The Apple thing was only attaching a hash code to each image and doing nothing else unless you uploaded it Apple’s servers.
    • m-ee 4y ago
      Apple was only going to scan images that were going to be uploaded to iCloud. It would be the same amount of coverage as what google does, and if you believe apples claims “more private” because it happens locally and would later let them roll out encrypted images on iCloud while still scanning for CSAM to satisfy the government. Of course you would have to trust that the policy of only iCloud images would stay in place after they implemented a tool to scan everything on your phone, which seems like a terrible bet.
      • ripper1138 4y ago
        You’re remembering it wrong. Go look it up. Apple also already does this for photos in iCloud.
        • m-ee 4y ago
• dspillett 4y ago
  This is why I backup my phone manually, my Google account is not used for any email I really care about, and I don't use it to authenticate anywhere else, etc. Same with other big providers (and smaller ones though for softly different reasons: they may vanish or be eaten by the larger fish). Having too much linked to one group, especially one famed for terrible user care when something goes wrong, is just asking for this sort of accident to happen, and for it to affect you as widely as possible.
• agilob 4y ago
  EU Chat Control will have an error budget of 10% https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/voaicx/10_error_rate_is_okay_leaked_eu_commission/ https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/voaicx/10_error_ra...
  • melff 4y ago
    I think how error prone the system is shouldn't matter, even it it was absolutely perfect, this is an dystopian privacy invasion.
• neverrroot 4y ago
  It used to be “do no evil”. Well google, evil is as evil does.
  • Ferret7446 4y ago
    This is exactly a case of "do no evil". Hosting "those" kinds of materials is evil, as decided by society/government. Who gets to decide what's evil? Be careful what you wish for.
    • neverrroot 4y ago
      Hosting them alone is not evil, unless made available to the whole world. What about not reinstating the account?
• nihilius 4y ago
  So theoretically some bad actor can just send someone pictures of cp to a gmail (and maybe google workspace) address and get them banned and investigated? This cant be right ...
• niuzeta 4y ago
  Okay, this convinces me to degoogle. What alternatives are there?
  • porbelm 4y ago
    For photos? A VPS with PhotoPrism. Mail? A VPS with Mailcow. Everything else? A... you see where this is going.
  • mackrevinack 4y ago
    degoogle reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/huk4rp https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/huk4rp or if you are into hosting things yourself on a VPS or your own NAS at home there are even more options to choose from: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted theres also yunohost or sandstorm that make self-hosting a bit easier for first timers
• dusted 4y ago
  "rules are rules" and this is why we need to get off of privately owned infrastructure for anything that matter.
• mlang79 4y ago
  Hmm, "The Circle" comes to mind. I wonder how many years we are away from this book becoming the reality. Quit Google Now. Remember that you were always a bit stupid to choose Gmail and bite the bullet and get rid of it. If you are an Android user, I feel your pain. The only thing I am a bit reluctant to throw away is my YT account. But if the content quality degradation keeps on going, it will eventually be quite easy to throw out.
• LatteLazy 4y ago
  People simultaneously want very strict policing of online spaces AND are not willing to pay for them at all. What do they expect? It surprises me that anyone here is blaming google, how many thousands of dollars should they spend deciding whether to delete an account worth a few pennies a year? When NOT deleting it leads to big fines and their company being branded a pedophile enabler?
• shultays 4y ago
  I wonder if he can ban anyone from Google by emailing them those pictures. Would AI detect those pictures as well? He should look for Google employees and ban them all
• bambax 4y ago
  The times, they are a-changin' Not long ago, every other comment about a case like this would say "well, Google is a private corporation, they can do as they please". Now, those comments have disappeared and most comments call for more regulation. The same thing happened with advertising. In the 2010s many people here advocated in favor of advertising, and often said ad-blockers were bad, useless, or criminal. And then the dominant view became that the Internet is absolutely unusable without a proper adblocker. Not sure if any positive change will come out of this (advertising certainly didn't go away) but it's fascinating to see.
• thereare5lights 4y ago
  We need laws that bar these monopolies and near monopolies from being able to deplatform people.
• scottydelta 4y ago
  The day Google banned(from Gmail and all Google products without ability to port thier data) some pixel phone buyers for reselling their phones[1], I did these 3 things: 1. Setup a new personal domain and email on fastmail. I can take my email somewhere else if fastmail decides to ban me. 2. Setup account on Backblaze for my backups, Google drive can't be trusted. 3. Moved to alternatives for all Google services. Removed Google signin from all the other websites. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/17/google-suspends-customer-accounts-for-reselling-pixel-phones https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/17/google-su...
  • doublerabbit 4y ago
    > Setup account on Backblaze for my backups, And what if Blacklaze decides to ban you? I feel that you should never rely on a remote-provider for backups. Unless you own the hardware to where your data sits, you have no backups at all.
    • ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      Well a backup in your house is worse, in case of flood/fire/robbery it's lost. Some people have a remote location or family home with good internet where they can place a NAS or something, but many do not. I've done it before, you have to call family member and ask them to unplug/restart. They are backups, you can make a new backup, unless your computer catchers fire at the same time as you get banned.
    • scottydelta 4y ago
      I am a paid customer and Backblaze has a customer support unlike Google who you can reach out to incase there is a misunderstanding.
  • namaria 4y ago
    This is the way. People are responding to this like Google is water or something. It's just a company whose services we use mostly for free out of convenience. If you come to depend on them, it's on you.
• Laarlf 4y ago
  Love it. More people scared of trusting large corporations will help everyone.
• fimdomeio 4y ago
  Google, wether via algorithms or human reviewers looked at this kids groin from photos that the guy expected to be private. This is the weird questionable behavior that should be ilegal.
• VBprogrammer 4y ago
  I have previously worried about this slightly when sharing videos of my daughter singing in the bath with my mum and my sisters. Pretty sad state of affairs.
• DawnQFunk2 4y ago
• vivegi 4y ago
  Another reason why cloud services must come with end-to-end encryption ON by default. What business does GOOG or any other big tech have with reading their customers' emails or analyzing their photos/videos etc., except for creating profiles with which they can push ads/sell stuff? Consumers must demand this (i.e., e2e encryption and no peeking) and shun products that don't offer it. I hope the father sues GOOG and wins hundreds of millions in damages for mental anguish, defamation, breach of privacy, denial of service, discrimination (do you think GOOG has never reinstated an account previously?) and every other legal grounds they have violated.
• RamblingCTO 4y ago
  I'll take the contrarian side. Why should Google allow underage nudes on their servers? There's so much wrong with this. Life's could be destroyed if their password gets cracked, the nudes leaked/sold. As a company I wouldn't touch this dumpsterfire with a stick.
• redditor98654 4y ago
  This is crazy; I have pictures of my son taking his first bath or his first swim in a tub and I shudder to think that I have to delete those because some algorithm will brand me as a paedophile. If my google account is blocked, I can’t even begin to imagine the extent of what would happen to my day to day.