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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

#321

Post by kornhole »

anon291 wrote: post #294
ISL wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Do you have any suggestions for open-source Android backup solutions that can back up everything? Because I'm having a hard time finding any.

I have Nextcloud running on a Raspberry PI along with a dozen other services on yunohost.org. Nextcloud automatically backs up my family's contacts, calendars, notes, tasks, photos, files, passwords, bookmarks, phone locations and more. If you want to backup the APK's check out Seedvault. I am personally fine manually reinstalling APK's if/when needed so have not tried Seedvault yet.

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

#322

Post by zuminator »

seszett wrote: post #120
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…

> It's fairly normal for parents to take pictures of their children naked in the bathtub/at the beach/ camping/etc. And what I understand is that each of these private photos of their children that parents take on an Android phone with Google cloud enabled gets specifically flagged to be shown to a stranger working for Google. That sounds pretty insane to me.

What's more a "professional" CP distributor would at the least encrypt or compress their photos, and probably not even use Gmail, maybe use a hijacked cracked account.* So that would lower the "true" positive rate even further.

*In fact that seems like it could be an effective form of extortion or swatting. Someone with access to your credentials could (threaten to) send CP over your account and ruin your life. Or destroy a small business.

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

#323

Post by shadowgovt »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #250
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…

> They only care about having to build a system, which can distinguish such cases from actually criminal ones

There are only two ways to actually do that:

1) Make Google's policies 100% subservient to the United States legal system, which would look a lot like the "corporate / national lock-step unity" one sees in actual fascism

2) Google build its own court system, independent from the United States court system but with equivalent power

Are either of those scenarios desirable?

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

#324

Post by kornhole »

egman_ekki wrote: post #232
zerof1l wrote: post #80

This story should serve as a warning and a motivation to move away from iCloud, Google Cloud, and alike for video and photo storage. The easiest thing is to just purchase a drive or NAS and store your media on it. If you're a bit tech-savvy, you can run your own NextCloud. I run NextCloud on Hetzner, 1TB storage box + web server for a total of $7 a month. Or you can get Hetzner to run the NextCloud for you for about…

Can NextCloud do OCR on the pictures, identify people and allow search by objects in the photo? Because those are the killer features for me that make it super useful to use Google photos.

Yes. https://github.com/marcelklehr/recognize I run Nextcloud on a Raspberry PI running yunohost.org for all my family.

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

#325

Post by peoplefromibiza »

wonderbore wrote: post #137
peoplefromibiza wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please explain why this is different from traveling to any other country. I haven't been to the US since they made it legal for custom officers to search travelers' personal electronics without a warrant and deny entry if you refuse, because, thanks but no thanks.

> Please explain why this is different from traveling to any other country. My guess is that the "trigger" for "any other country" is much higher. Criticize the US President all you like on every social network: not a problem. Save a screenshot of Winnie the Pooh: you're playing with fire.

> Criticize the US President all you like on every social network: not a problem.

given that this [1] already happened in my country, and also this [2] also happened (just to name a couple) and nobody paid, that there are 13,000 American soldiers on my Country's soil and that this [3] man has been POTUS and is probably running again for election, I wouldn't say "not a problem".

US could reach me at my house if they wanted to, OTOH PRC can't do much.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Cavalese_cable_car_crash

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Omar_case

[3] https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/07/trump-demands-barr-...

> Save a screenshot of Winnie the Pooh: you're playing with fire.

I imagine this is sarcasm.

Winnie the Pooh has never actually put anyone in real troubles.

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

#326

Post by peoplefromibiza »

MerelyMortal wrote: post #178
peoplefromibiza wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those countries would love to blackmail you based on what? At least is an entire Country that will blackmail me, must think I am really important, not some rando that hacked iCloud to find celebrities boobs and post them online... > Just encrypt your data rclone would do that. yeah, but rclone is an offline backup, basically. cloud storage is for when you need immediate access and search capabilities.

Maybe not you specificially, but for example in the U.S., there are over three million people with security clearances. That's a large pool for an adversary to choose from. Maybe all an adversary needs for one particular mission is to identify a janitor at a facility, go through some of their content to find a nude selfie that they might be embarrased if their family saw, and the adversary says, it would be a shame i…

> Maybe not you specificially, but for example in the U.S., there are over three million people with security clearances

it's private files, not secret state information.

things like my address book, SMS (mostly inbound alerts, nobody sends them anymore), WhatsApp backups (which are encrypted) or pictures I took with the phone's camera, nothing compromising.

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

#327

Post by [deleted] »

yyyk wrote: post #303
mulmen wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prohibition didn’t work. Everyone who wanted to kept drinking. Religious guilt is an ineffective motivator of change. Source: human history. It’s time to move on.

>Religious guilt is an ineffective motivator of change. >Source: human history. The alcohol consumption statistics of certain ME states strongly disprove your thesis.

[deleted]

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

#328

Post by encryptluks2 »

happyopossum wrote: post #286
sandworm101 wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which to be fair, the guy lives in San Francisco. It isn't that hard to file a small claims case. I understand that there may be some legal nuisances involved, but just getting the attention of the legal review team that will have to show up to defend the case is usually enough to get them to evaluate a matter beyond the algorithms. I don't think it is fair, but is much quicker and cheaper $7,000.

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

#329

Post by nullc »

dennis_jeeves1 wrote: post #319
nullc wrote: post #83

> “I decided it was probably not worth $7,000,” he said. lol. Missing 4 zeros there. Part of the reason for the brazen actions of companies like Google is that their substantial financial means and legal department sizes grant them a substantial degree of immunity to judicial review.

>lol. Missing 4 zeros there. Also some execs behind bars won't be a bad idea. Granted that mistakes do happen, but when they don't resolve it in a timely manner, punishment is fair. Addendum : I don't know if companies have a govt imposed rule to report porn, in that case I'd say the root cause is the govt, not the company. Of course if the root cause is govt, and even more root cause is people themselves. People col…

> I don't know if companies have a govt imposed rule to report porn

In the US there isn't and generally cannot be a government requirement to search the customer's data. If there were, the provider would effectively acting as an agent of the government and the customer would enjoy 4th amendment protection of their privacy (absent a warrant or other, similarly targeted and justified reason).

Unfortunately, there is a bit of a wink-nod situation going on where the government quietly pressures companies to engage in these activities "voluntarily" -- in exchange for varrious forms of preferential treatment and refraining from enforcing other regulations -- and in court when a target attempts to present 4th amendment defenses everyone pretends (and testifies) that the provider was searching the customers private files of their own volition and not on the government's behalf.

In this game neither the provider nor the governments hands are clean because they are both conspiring to undermine the constitutional rights of the public.

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

#330

Post by googlryas »

SergeAx wrote: post #142

Also, it looks like a powerful attack vector. Just slip a questionable content onto a victim's phone - and voila, a lot of trouble is under way, probably irreversible.

Especially because you can take photos with someone's phone without locking it. All you need is brief physical access to the phone.
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