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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

#281

Post by kornhole »

blueflow wrote: post #39
HL33tibCe7 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you can’t even escape these companies by moving to another country. They have their tendrils everywhere, except in places that consciously prevent them - which is usually done by even worse tyrannies like China/Russia. Always makes me laugh when I see employees of Google, Amazon etc. claiming to be “anti-fascist” and “standing in solidarity with the common man” etc etc…

You still have the choice to not use any of their services. You can get pretty far in life despite not using the internet at all.

It is funny how some consider the internet synonymous with Google and the other big players. You don't need to use Google and the others at all these days. So many alternatives abound. The problem seems to be awareness of them. Ask me anything.

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

#282

Post by Enginerrrd »

Gatsky wrote: post #195
Enginerrrd wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, I'd guess the opposite when we consider the base rate. Seems like a classic Bayesian problem. It's fairly normal for parents to take pictures of their children naked in the bathtub/at the beach/ camping/etc. Conversely, I'd expect actual pedophiles and CSAM producers to be really quite rare. So even a relatively low base-rate of normal parents with normal nude photos would likely dwarf CSAM upon detection. So, i…

If the types of photos you mention were getting flagged as per the case in the article, we would be hearing about a lot more cases. The case itself involved a medical photo, not smiling children at the beach. As such the denominator you use isn’t relevant here. There is a lot of child pornography in image sharing platforms. Facebook, which reports most reliably, had 20 million CSAM reports in 2021, and that’s photos…

Some fair points, but I have a couple of counter points...

One, We really need to know the base rates and false positive rates to reason well here.

Two, I think you'd also need to consider the number of people and number of photos. So like, a photo can be considered a trial, OR flagging a person can. I would imagine a given pedophile has a large number of CSAM photos, but there are few pedophiles. There are however lots of normal parents with fewer photos that might trigger a false positive, but because of that base-rate issue, even if the probability that a given photo is falsely identified as CSAM is quite low, the probability that a given person is falsely flagged/reported may NOT be low.

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

#283

Post by huyage »

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #16

controversial opinion: as much as everybody knows that China isn't exactly championing the western way of life and western democratic standards, I keep my private files in a Chinese cloud (backups are kept private in a NAS in my house). Why? Because they are not in contact with our authorities and, frankly, the chances my private files will be of any interest for Chinese authorities are close to zero. Not that I have…

Can you recommend you provider? I've been wanting to do the same thing for a while.

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

#284

Post by prox »

tromp wrote: post #143
prox wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah also think the word/concept fascism doesn’t fit here. While it is obviously oppressive or unjust, it is a company, so what would be a better fit?

unaccountable

That does fit Googles profile in various matters.

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

#285

Post by diebeforei485 »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #169

> subsequent review of his account turned up a video from six months earlier that Google also considered problematic, of a young child lying in bed with an unclothed woman. Isn’t that also a description of breastfeeding?

It's not Google's place to say what is or isn't problematic.

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

#286

Post by happyopossum »

sandworm101 wrote: post #268
prepend wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 law…

7000$ is a pitance. Maybe this case is simple, but many will not be. Say they raid a house and confiscate a hard drive. Encrypted or not, that is going to be a huge thing. Arguments will be made about whether anything incriminating was stored on that drive. Just google the cost of a forensic expert witness. Both sides will need one. Such costs are actually why so many police agencies are backing off of CP investigati…

The reference to $7k isn’t to prosecute a CP case, it was to sue google to reinstate his account so he could get his digital life back.

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

#287

Post by mulmen »

dgfitz wrote: post #247
mulmen wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it your claim that one medium sized city somehow has a bigger problem than the nation it exists within?

Baltimore has 10,000,000 people. The United States is larger by a factor of thirty three.

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

#288

Post by Invictus0 »

soraminazuki wrote: post #161
vgatherps wrote: post #63

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…

Devil's advocate:

Proven innocent is not a thing, there is only "declined to prosecute [because there was no crime]."

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

#289

Post by fluidcruft »

christophilus wrote: post #89
vgatherps wrote: post #63

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…

If due process was followed, and the police / state exonerated the parents, I don’t think anyone would blame Google for reactivating the accounts. They’d blame the police or whatever flawed exoneration process was used. At least, that’s what I’d hope. Google here looks even worse than I thought possible, and I’m a de-Googled, anti-fan, so I already had a very dim view of them.

What if the police don't feel it's interesting enough yet (or don't have funds) to investigate and put things on the backburner for lack of resources? Similar to the mountains of unprocessed rape kits.

These are interesting cases but it seems like they happen to be ones where the police bothered do anything.

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

#290

Post by [deleted] »

felix318 wrote: post #273
4gotunameagain wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an atheist, and I intensely disagree with the sexualisation of everything in our society dressed as a new sexual revolution, and see it as a direct effect of capitalism. What say you

The other day I read something about how society must “prevent the oversexualization of children” and that got me thinking, who will protect the oversexualization of society itself? The answer was obvious to me.

[deleted]
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