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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

#481

Post by lolinder »

41b696ef1113 wrote: post #377
MrDresden wrote: post #102

I keep telling anyone who will listen that they need to move every aspect of their online identity away from the big tech giants, and make sure that each type of service (email, webpage, memory storage, document storage, backups, contacts, etc) is compartmentalized in such a way that if one gets removed then it wont affect the others in any way. Imagine having all your memories in the form of images and videos taken…

I want to, really I do, but it feels like trading one devil for another. Email is by far the biggest albatross around my neck. To migrate email requires me to setup two different failure points: purchase a domain and a Fastmail-like service. Now that is two different places that are subject to me forgetting to pay a bill, being social engineered into giving away my account, etc. To say nothing of the long tail of acq…

Autopay is simple to set up with any hosting provider. If you're in a financial place where the $5/mo and $10/yr payments might bounce... yeah, probably don't pay for email.

As far as the social engineering goes, personally I gladly take that risk in order to bring my email firmly into my control. If I'm going to lose access to my email, I want it to be because I did something stupid, not because an algorithm flagged my account and Google has no humans I can appeal to.

The long tail of acquaintances isn't bad either: just forward emails from Gmail to your new address. If you lose access to the Gmail account at some point, you'd have lost everything anyway, so this arrangement would be strictly better.

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

#482

Post by Aeolun »

amelius wrote: post #3
superchroma wrote: post #2

"Google’s review team [then] flagged a video he made and the San Francisco Police Department had already started to investigate him." That sounds like a permanent stain on his records.

Also a permanent stain on Google's reputation.

A stain on Google’s reputation? You won’t see a trace of this mild brown smudge on that layer of tar.

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

#483

Post by therealdrag0 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #442
therealdrag0 wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar in South Korea: https://www.thesun.co.uk/travel/5476857/south-korean-game-do... But what does this have to do with nudity or destroying lives? Seems totally off base.

The similarity is because it's an example of something other cultures see as normal, or at least harmless, but in the US it is seen as an egregious offense. Not hard for me to imagine a 7 year old American getting expelled and potentially prosecuted for trying to play a "Kancho" prank on a friend.

Any source of a 7 yo being procedures for this or similar?

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

#484

Post by boredemployee »

makach wrote: post #196

It is beyond me that someone would use email to submit sensitive information. Pandemic aside, you should know better. Also, I am sorry this happened. It is very human to respond to a person in authority - but we need to be better and start asking questions. It is our privacy at stake. Hopefully everyone learns from this; Also, Google was doing the right things.

Trying to understand why did u get so downvoted.

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

#485

Post by lolinder »

MrDresden wrote: post #298
mysterydip wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you use the same email or 2FA for all of those? If so, you still have a potential single point of failure if that provider decides to ban your account.

It is unlikely that both the email and 2FA will fail you at the same time, unless perhaps you are using gmail and Google authenticator (though I am not sure how much authenticator is tied to your Google identity as I don't use it). Use email, phone and app 2FA plus printable 2FA codes, and you'll always have a way. Frankly if all of these can be made inaccessible in one go then the setup was mighty flawed to begin wi…

Google authenticator was entirely offline the last time I checked, so even it should be fine.

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

#486

Post by Aeolun »

hedora wrote: post #454
userbinator wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Apple who caused an immense controversy with its CSAM scanning debacle? All of Big Tech is ultimately not so different.

They cancelled the CSAM scanning project. In contrast, Google has been doing CSAM (and apparently AI porn detection) for years. Also, the bone-headed Apple plan had safeguards that would have prevented the victim in the article from losing their account. The two policies aren't remotely comparable.

Yeah, Apple was annoying (not even that really, it’s just the idea rather than the actual effect that bothers me), but ultimately fairly benign compared to what Google does.

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

#487

Post by pessimizer »

adventured wrote: post #456
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The similarity is because it's an example of something other cultures see as normal, or at least harmless, but in the US it is seen as an egregious offense. Not hard for me to imagine a 7 year old American getting expelled and potentially prosecuted for trying to play a "Kancho" prank on a friend.

And many normal cultural things in the US would be regarded as an egregious offense in Japan (which has a very rigid, conservative, homogenous culture). So what.

Do you have an example, or are you just saying this?

edit: there's honestly never an excuse not to do an existence proof. All you have to do is cite one thing.

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

#488

Post by sreevisakh »

Roark66 wrote: post #40
XorNot wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly: don't upload unencrypted content to anyone, for exactly this reason. I have cloud backups of family photos, but they're all through restic or rclone with the crypt filter applied. Privacy is about the right to put yourself in context .

The problem with personal encryption for long term storage is that it is easy to loose private keys and passwords.

That's a problem with very easy solutions, considering what's at stake. Use a paperkey, NFC card, smartcard or even a printed data matrix sheet to store the keys and/or password DBs. The reason why all these aren't popular enough is that people don't consider privacy to be important - until something goes seriously wrong, like in this story.

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

#490

Post by hedora »

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #325
wonderbore wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 w…

Here's an example of a chinese Univerity of Minnesota grad student that tweeted Winnie the Pooh (among other things) while in the US, and was later imprisoned in China for it:

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/university-of-minnes...

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