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

nytimes.com

181–190 of 609 posts

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

#181
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.…

Same here. Those shitty providers are a too high risk.

Many years ago Microsoft has banned my outlook account for no reason. I tried contacting the support to resolve the issue - nothing. Only after writing a letter, I received the answer from Microsoft Germany:

We banned your account because I was distributing porn through onedrive (which I was not doing). The investigation showed that Microsoft could not find any wrongdoing. The account was gone nevertheless.

This is why I say:

- skip Gmail/Outlook and all this crap, use something proper like mailbox.org with your own domain - dont trust cloud. Backup once a month, use two clouds at the same time, have a cold storage with your backups - biggest risk is your apple icloud account. dont be dependant on them: dont use their credit card - dont use google/ms 2fa apps - have multiple accounts in parallel: one for google drive, one for search, one for mail (if you need it), one for youtube, etc

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

#182
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is at best authoritarianism or corportatism not fascism. There is no ultranationalism, there is no "othering", there is no enforced hierarchy of individuals.

There is cooperation between state and corporations for "greater good". There is "othering", see also "deplorables".

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

#183
post #60

I have a larger issue that no one addressed. There has to be some type of special software for the medical profession that allows you to take a picture on your phone that is not stored on your phone and that you send to the doctor.

You are asking an unfortunately reasonable question. The fucked up thing is that your normal camera app should suffice for this.

It should suffice if you disable cloud sync and backups.

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

#184
The biggest failure here is Google's continued refusal to segment their services and this has been a problem since at least the Google+ days, which is more than a decade ago at this point.

During Google+, Google controversially instituted a "real name" policy. This was controversial and completely driven by Vic Gundotra who would get up at company meetings when asked about this (back when he still answered questions because believe me that ended) and said "we don't want people named 'dog fart'".

Legitimate concerns that people might have for their safety were completely brushed aside.

Anyway, the enforcement for this of course was automatic and resulted in I'm sure many false positives. But what happened when your account was flagged/ You lose access to everything.

This too was criticized at the time and people asked "well if it's a policy violation for Google+, why do people lose their Gmail?". These questions too were completely brushed off.

At this time I decided I simply couldn't and wouldn't use any other Google service because my Gmail is too important to risk by an automatic ban from a false positive on a completely unrelated product.

And here we are, a decade later, with the exact same nonsense happening.

Now of course the CSAM ban itself is ridiculous. Refusing to reverse it is ridiculous. All of that is true. But don't tie your email or your phone to a company's other services when they do blanket bans like this.

Disclaimer: Xoogler.

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

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In what world would Google receive criticism for giving back accounts to people who has been proven innocent ? Google's surveillance system and automated ban hammers are already bad enough. But the actions they took following the ban in this case is egregious and 100% indefensible. At the very least, Google could've reinstated their victim's account and issued a full sincere apology upon being contacted by the NYT. I…

>> If Google has any care for their users, they'd do that for every people they wrongly reported that had their names cleared. Instead, Google doubled down, continued to treat their victims as criminals in their statement, and even leaked details about intimate photos in a blatant attempt to discredit the users they wronged.

Google's users are advertisers. Ordinary people are data sources and ad viewers. Android phones and Chrome are for collecting data about people and showing them ads.

Google doesn't care about losing two data sources and ad viewers.

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

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How can data/files stored on somebody else's computer be subject to 4th amendment rights?

It would certainly be a rolling back of the farce that is Third Party Doctrine. That's for sure.

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

#189
What are the ways to mitigate these issues for someone that wants a lot of the features of Google Photos? It seems that Amazon Photos is basically copying Google Photos and has a lot of the features. I wouldn't care if my Amazon account was closed down. And it is free if you are already a Prime member.
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