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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

#151

Post by yborg »

mikece wrote: post #8
amelius wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also a permanent stain on Google's reputation.

Google has a responsibility, to a limited degree, to turn over to law enforcement anything that they know about abuse that comes through their system. More likely, the trigger for that is set really low as a corporate CYA and to pass the buck. I can totally see Google's point of view on this: We're providing a free* service to you, we're not going to stick our neck out and risk ANY liability of being blamed of storin…

And after law enforcement cleared the guy, was it also Google's responsibility to ban him forever based on their own mistake?

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

#152

Post by ugjka »

SergeAx wrote: post #147
ugjka wrote: post #71

> Not only did he lose emails, contact information for friends and former colleagues, and documentation of his son’s first years of life, his Google Fi account shut down, meaning he had to get a new phone number with another carrier. Without access to his old phone number and email address, he couldn’t get the security codes he needed to sign in to other internet accounts, locking him out of much of his digital life.…

Moved where? Not to iCloud, I hope? Self-hosting mail, calendar and media is too complex task for 99% of population. This is not a solution.

Proton, Hetzner Nextcloud

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

#153

Post by ISL »

ugjka wrote: post #71

> Not only did he lose emails, contact information for friends and former colleagues, and documentation of his son’s first years of life, his Google Fi account shut down, meaning he had to get a new phone number with another carrier. Without access to his old phone number and email address, he couldn’t get the security codes he needed to sign in to other internet accounts, locking him out of much of his digital life.…

One solution to many of these concerns is a periodic backup (via Takeout) of your Google account.

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

#154

Post by dannyr »

scarface74 wrote: post #19

I’ve heard too many things about how non existent Google’s customer service is to ever trust them for anything critical. You hardly ever hear stories like this from any of the other big tech companies. I’m excluding FB, because I don’t care about FB enough.

Can you name other big tech companies with good customer service that is purely software?

You can get customer service from Google's hardware just like Apple.

It's the software/services that have awful/non-existent customer service.

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

#156

Post by GekkePrutser »

ugjka wrote: post #71

> Not only did he lose emails, contact information for friends and former colleagues, and documentation of his son’s first years of life, his Google Fi account shut down, meaning he had to get a new phone number with another carrier. Without access to his old phone number and email address, he couldn’t get the security codes he needed to sign in to other internet accounts, locking him out of much of his digital life.…

I moved that off too. Aurora Store in anonymous mode works great and also shows privacy info of each app

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

#157

Post by scarface74 »

dannyr wrote: post #154
scarface74 wrote: post #19

I’ve heard too many things about how non existent Google’s customer service is to ever trust them for anything critical. You hardly ever hear stories like this from any of the other big tech companies. I’m excluding FB, because I don’t care about FB enough.

Can you name other big tech companies with good customer service that is purely software? You can get customer service from Google's hardware just like Apple. It's the software/services that have awful/non-existent customer service.

So I can walk into one of 272 Google Stores in the US and talk to a real person about any Google product I pay for like I can with Apple?

I can depend on Google to support a Google branded phone I bought in 2013 with security updates 8 years later like an iPhone 5s user could or with operating system updates for a phone I bought in 2015?

The original poster couldn’t get anyone on the line about a Google account. You can call an Apple CSR about an iCloud issue.

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

#158

Post by qwery »

peaslock wrote: post #129
wormer wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's literally capitalism. It's the system that Google was allowed to thrive in and become this powerful.

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.

So we should shame all the users of Google products, in this case? I'm not sure that shame really works like that and especially when (I assume) there are billions of people using the same products. There's a somewhat lower number of entities controlling the company -- maybe a more effective target.

Plot twist: (maybe) Xyz is (not) an (un)ethical company, so we should establish some sort of authority on ethics with a malleable but firm framework to guide the consistent -- and proportional to the unethics in question -- application of shame to the people using the products.

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