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A dad took photos of his toddler for a doctor – Google flagged him as a criminal

nytimes.com

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Re: A dad took photos of his toddler for a doctor – Google flagged him as a criminal

#241

Post by quickthrower2 »

some-human wrote: post #187
ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to self-host, there are plenty of alternatives for each service offered by google.

The problem is finding them. If a layman looks for a cloud back up provider that isn't one of the BigTech group - uses Duck Duck Go and finds a small company offering 10GB back up for free. Unfortunately for them, that service is using AWS for storage, so ultimately despite they're best effort they're just using amazon cloud storage.

This is where the small guys kick ass vs the Googles/Microsoft. Try Dropbox, Backblaze etc. Much better experience. Apple is OK UX wise but locked in which sucks.

Re: A dad took photos of his toddler for a doctor – Google flagged him as a criminal

#242

Post by prepend »

soraminazuki wrote: post #15

> 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 Google's automated screw-ups. In this case, Google was notified of the issue by the NYT. Yet they actively chose to continue to screw over their victims just because they can. > In a statement, Google said, “Child sexual abuse material is abhorrent and we’re com…

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

Re: A dad took photos of his toddler for a doctor – Google flagged him as a criminal

#244

Post by scarface74 »

some-human wrote: post #187
ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to self-host, there are plenty of alternatives for each service offered by google.

The problem is finding them. If a layman looks for a cloud back up provider that isn't one of the BigTech group - uses Duck Duck Go and finds a small company offering 10GB back up for free. Unfortunately for them, that service is using AWS for storage, so ultimately despite they're best effort they're just using amazon cloud storage.

People have a problem finding DropBox, OneDrive, Box, Apple iCloud?

Re: A dad took photos of his toddler for a doctor – Google flagged him as a criminal

#245

Post by davidmurdoch »

Gigachad wrote: post #128
MrDresden wrote: post #102

I keep telling anyone who will listen that they need to move every aspect of their online identity away from the big tech giants, and make sure that each type of service (email, webpage, memory storage, document storage, backups, contacts, etc) is compartmentalized in such a way that if one gets removed then it wont affect the others in any way. Imagine having all your memories in the form of images and videos taken…

This event happens so rarely that it would be better advice to tell people to wear a bullet proof vest and helmet when going outside. It’s more likely to benefit them than self hosting media.

Anecdote: It's happened twice for me. Once was for an app I published they decided was against ToS, two years after I published it. And the other was an accidental account deletion when upgrading Google Apps (luckily this one was mostly recoverable... if you know the right people at Google).

Re: A dad took photos of his toddler for a doctor – Google flagged him as a criminal

#246

Post by ramesh31 »

What's actually scary here is that these were newly taken photos; not existing CSAM material flagged by hash value. That means Google is doing real time image recognition on all of your photos. And that means Google has an ML model somewhere trained on millions of pictures of.... yeah this is fucked up.

Re: A dad took photos of his toddler for a doctor – Google flagged him as a criminal

#247

Post by dgfitz »

mulmen wrote: post #29
hosteur wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you not print naked adults?

Puritans. We “banned” alcohol for 13 years. America’s greatest battle is with our dark religious past. We claim to be secular but really it’s an aspiration.

> America’s greatest battle is with our dark religious past.

Apparently you’ve never been to Baltimore. There is no dark religious past haunting that city, just corrupt politicians.

Re: A dad took photos of his toddler for a doctor – Google flagged him as a criminal

#248

Post by welder »

nrmitchi wrote: post #238
welder wrote: post #217

What if someone emails stock photos to Google execs that are known to trigger Google's child abuse algorithm? They would have to build a way to re-activate banned accounts to get their own accounts back.

I don’t think anyone believes the technical process does not exist. Someone with enough clout would 100% be able to get accounts reinstated (likely without even needing a police report of no wrong-doing). Google’s refusal to have appropriate moderation and support for edge-case situations is a completely different thing.

Then send it to tons of lawyers, politicians, judges, etc and a law might get passed forcing Google to reactivate accounts.

Re: A dad took photos of his toddler for a doctor – Google flagged him as a criminal

#250

Post by zelphirkalt »

soraminazuki wrote: post #15

> 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 Google's automated screw-ups. In this case, Google was notified of the issue by the NYT. Yet they actively chose to continue to screw over their victims just because they can. > In a statement, Google said, “Child sexual abuse material is abhorrent and we’re com…

> 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.

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