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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

#521

Post by LorenPechtel »

rwalle wrote: post #379
neurostimulant wrote: post #205

My wife is a doctor and received a few of these kind of images in whatsapp from her patients from time to time. Should she be concerned?

Are you located in the US? If so, I would be really concerned, not in this context but about potential violation of HIPPA. All my communication with a doctor's office goes through the "private message" of the office/hospital's website because there are regulations around that. Think about it -- what if she lost her phone and for some reason the phone is unlocked or decrypted by other means? And even if you are not lo…

I doubt a doctor as the recipient would get in trouble--they have legitimate needs to look at things. And it's not a HIPAA violation if the patient sends it. It's only a HIPAA violation if the doctor sends it insecurely.

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

#522

Post by pentae »

fomine3 wrote: post #503
lolinder wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not fully confident that I'll never cancel a credit card that pays annual subscription. Generally it's fine because alert email would come on my inbox, but it's email infrastructure so I need extra attention.

You can prepurchase a domain for 10 years. Set a calendar reminder 9 years from now to renew for another 10..

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

#523

Post by LorenPechtel »

quantified wrote: post #428

What is not explained in the article is how the telehealth's services came in contact with Google's image-scanning to begin with. Is this not a huge breach of HIPAA? Telehealth is sort of done for if randos at bug tech can find there way into your sexual health records.

Telehealth had nothing to do with it other than causing the picture to be taken. The picture was taken with a Google-linked phone, the AI flagged it as CSAM. The transfer to the pediatrician was probably secure and not seen by Sauron's Eye.

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

#524

Post by noisy_boy »

username223 wrote: post #339
ugjka wrote: 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.…

> The more eggs you have in one basket, the more likely the basket is to break This. Use Yahoo for your email, Verizon for your phone number, Dropbox for your backups, Facebook for your socials… It doesn’t matter which you choose, but fragment your digital life. When one part goes bad, it won’t infect the others.

I'm still totally not off Google yet but this is the direction I'm going in. Fastmail for email (still need to do the POP/IMAP setup for local caching using Thunderbird), local ISP for phone number, Syncthing for syncing across PCs/Android phones (except iOS which lives in its own world) and Facebook has been deleted long ago. Just takes a while to get off Google because of years of sign-ups but I already got the financial and government services off it.

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

#526

Post by fsckboy »

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.

> The similarity is because it's an example of something other cultures see as normal

no, the similarity (and why it was posted) is that both games consist of kids attempting to stick their fingers up somebody else's butt.

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

#527

Post by LorenPechtel »

The real problem here is companies are not cops and should quit acting like cops.

The instant a company has evidence of a possible crime being committed they should be required to hand the evidence over to the police and then take no other action other than preventing distributing it or the like.

This is not just Google's AI goofing up on what constitutes CSAM (and it sounds like given the witch hunt about such things that Google was being reasonable in informing the police), but colleges expelling "rapists" without evidence etc. The accused never gets anything resembling a fair trial but since it's not the government doing it that doesn't matter, there's no repercussions from messing up lives based on completely incompetent investigations.

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

#528

Post by bogomipz »

ramesh31 wrote: post #246

What's actually scary here is that these were newly taken photos; not existing CSAM material flagged by hash value. That means Google is doing real time image recognition on all of your photos. And that means Google has an ML model somewhere trained on millions of pictures of.... yeah this is fucked up.

From a link the article:

While historical approaches to finding this content have relied exclusively on matching against hashes of known CSAM, the classifier keeps up with offenders by also targeting content that has not been previously confirmed as CSAM.[1]

[1] https://www.blog.google/around-the-globe/google-europe/using...

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

#529

Post by bogomipz »

hedora wrote: post #505
shadowgovt wrote: post #332

This was a predictable outcome of the following factors: * Criminalizing possession and creation of child pornography equivalently * Conscripting the tech sector into detecting it via SESTA/FOSTA. Look forward to reading stories like this ad nauseum.

You could shorten your comment to "This was a predictable outcome of conscripting the tech sector", and it would be more accurate / precise. Child pornography is only one of many areas where false positives in legally mandated sescanners end up ruining people. Credit card payments come to mind, though I think those are mostly self-regulation.

What's an "sescanner"?

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

#530

Post by mceachen »

Aeolun wrote: post #467
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.

I have tried this many times, and literally the only time it succeeded was when I had it exported to Google Drive. It feels like they built it to say that you can, but your data is still just as locked as before…

Try fetching only your photos in one archive, your Gmail in a separate archive, and then everything else in a third.

If you have "too many" Google photos and that archive fails, create albums for every year, and only download a year/album at a time. It's a huge PITA, but at least you'll get your stuff back. (Kinda: depending on how you uploaded your photos, the metadata may come back truncated or altered).

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