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A Dad Took Photos of His Kid for the Doctor. Google Flagged Him as a Criminal

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Re: A Dad Took Photos of His Kid for the Doctor. Google Flagged Him as a Criminal

#21

Post by Alupis »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #8
josephcsible wrote: post #2

It's been three months, and AFAIK, Google still hasn't given him his account back yet.

Forget that - Google states to the media they had reviewed the situation and had decided to uphold his ban. Good luck convincing them to admit their “appeal” system, and their media review, were mistakes. Google is too arrogant for that.

It might be worth remembering we only have one side of the story here. How do we know we can thoroughly trust the Dad any more than we can thoroughly trust Google? Perhaps there are more pictures Dad took the article doesn't know about? Perhaps Google can't verify it was indeed Dad's child in the images?

Perhaps there is more to the story than what the article lets on...perhaps not. We will never really know.

Re: A Dad Took Photos of His Kid for the Doctor. Google Flagged Him as a Criminal

#22

Post by josephcsible »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #12
bagels wrote: post #7

Does getting your google account blocked prevent you from using GCP? There are so many stories of people losing access to google accounts that it seems way too risky to use GCP when this sort of thing can happen.

Potentially yes, if you use a personal account for GCP. Don’t do it. If you have to use GCP, use a burner account… because Google is absolutely asinine right now. I would not trust Google if they were a hired employee to turn on my sprinklers in the morning. Edit: For this reason, I am actually all in favor of having GCP, AWS, Azure, etc declared utilities. Unless there is a crime, we have a right to an account. Your…

> If you have to use GCP, use a burner account

Does that actually help? Don't they collect enough of your data to be able to correlate accounts?

Re: A Dad Took Photos of His Kid for the Doctor. Google Flagged Him as a Criminal

#24

Post by kadoban »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #12
bagels wrote: post #7

Does getting your google account blocked prevent you from using GCP? There are so many stories of people losing access to google accounts that it seems way too risky to use GCP when this sort of thing can happen.

Potentially yes, if you use a personal account for GCP. Don’t do it. If you have to use GCP, use a burner account… because Google is absolutely asinine right now. I would not trust Google if they were a hired employee to turn on my sprinklers in the morning. Edit: For this reason, I am actually all in favor of having GCP, AWS, Azure, etc declared utilities. Unless there is a crime, we have a right to an account. Your…

Doesn't Google famously link accounts that have ever had anything to do with each other, and ban them as a group? I recall some businesses getting their play store accounts banned because some dev did sketchy stuff separately, or the other way around.

Re: A Dad Took Photos of His Kid for the Doctor. Google Flagged Him as a Criminal

#25

Post by wholinator2 »

cozzyd wrote: post #9
Barrin92 wrote: post #6

what happened to the guy was awful but in general, don't ever store medical correspondence on Google cloud or send it over email or messengers . Here in the EU and I would be surprised if it's different in the US there's dedicated apps for telemedicine which are regulated like medical devices, so there's confidentiality, no storage or scanning of vieo or audio, and so on. Sucks but you can't really treat any other se…

right but most people take pictures with their phones nowadays, which might automatically backup up to google photos.

I figure it's probably not typical but I disable every single piece of tracking possible and disallow any external cloud storage on every device I have. I just don't actually have a need to give Google thousands of my photographs and access to every piece of my personal history. The benefit would be marginal and the cost is unlikely but potentially catastrophic. (And seemingly more likely every year). Every new device I get I go through every setting and turn off all the new bullshit they've put in to steal my privacy, because they do constantly add to the attack surface.

Re: A Dad Took Photos of His Kid for the Doctor. Google Flagged Him as a Criminal

#28

Post by gjsman-1000 »

josephcsible wrote: post #22
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Potentially yes, if you use a personal account for GCP. Don’t do it. If you have to use GCP, use a burner account… because Google is absolutely asinine right now. I would not trust Google if they were a hired employee to turn on my sprinklers in the morning. Edit: For this reason, I am actually all in favor of having GCP, AWS, Azure, etc declared utilities. Unless there is a crime, we have a right to an account. Your…

> If you have to use GCP, use a burner account Does that actually help? Don't they collect enough of your data to be able to correlate accounts?

Perhaps, but better safe than sorry. If you had a small business and relied on Google Workspace, the damage for one mistake like this could be incalculable.

Imagine losing your contacts, your photos, your emails with clients, your cloud setup… because you had the humanity to take care of your child.

It is impossible to underestimate Google now.

Re: A Dad Took Photos of His Kid for the Doctor. Google Flagged Him as a Criminal

#29

Post by walrus01 »

bagels wrote: post #7

Does getting your google account blocked prevent you from using GCP? There are so many stories of people losing access to google accounts that it seems way too risky to use GCP when this sort of thing can happen.

imagine what happens if you use google's domain registrar services.

even if you were to run a domain name zonefile that pointed its MX at something non-google and had zero A records or CNAMEs pointing at things hosted on GCP, you'd still risk being unable to login or admin your domain.

Re: A Dad Took Photos of His Kid for the Doctor. Google Flagged Him as a Criminal

#30

Post by josephcsible »

sekh60 wrote: post #3

This story broke the camels back for us when it first appeared here and got us to migrate our email to protonmail and a domain we bought.

I wish we had a portable email address format, like phone numbers are, instead of being inherently tied to a provider.
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