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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

#71

Post by ugjka »

> 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,” he said.

I only have a google account to have access to Play store. Everything else, mail, calendar, photos and storage, has been moved off Google

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

#72

Post by jacknews »

gpt5 wrote: post #28
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…

This is fine as long as you don’t plan to travel to China in the future.

Or to any China-aligned or vassal states, they don't need to bother with complex extradition procedures, they just ask the government 'nicely'. eg https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cambodia-china-uighurs-id...

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

#73

Post by octoberfranklin »

petee wrote: post #53
hosteur wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you not print naked adults?

One example would be protecting employees from someone just bringing in photos of themselves with the sole intent of exposing themselves to the employee, as they have a captive audience.

This policy does nothing to impede a person with that intent. The employee still looked at the photo.

In fact, the policy was why they examined the photo carefully.

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

#74

Post by tehbeard »

mulmen wrote: post #29
hosteur wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you not print naked adults?

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.

As much as the evangelicals of America screw with the rest of the world in their quest for purity, the better answer seems to be:

How do you know those nudes are taken consensually? And what's your liability for developing ("reproducing") them?

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

#75

Post by LadyCailin »

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.

For this type of encryption, I think the password could be “password” and that would be good enough. The primary goal is to frustrate automated scans, not targeted brute force attempts.

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

#76

Post by leereeves »

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.

How would you (for example) apply for a job without the Internet?

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

#77

Post by NoPie »

Gatsky wrote: post #66
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…

What do you think is the ratio of innocent to nefarious pictures of naked children Google encounters in aggregate? This is relevant to how outraged one should be by this story. I think it is probably > 1:100000. As such, probably not much outrage is warranted, although it’s obviously not great for this one guy.

Somehow I think there more parents who sometimes need to take a photo of their naked children than there are paedophiles.

Or at least the ratio is clearly not 1:100000, maybe more like closer to 1:10.

You would need statistics how many times google have reported police and how many times it have turned out to be a false alarm. Does google even keep record of false alarms? Most likely they don't to avoid responsibility.

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

#78

Post by peoplefromibiza »

mulmen wrote: post #41
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…

You are very naïve. In a recent comment thread I noted that my father’s generation went from fighting a bitter war with Vietnam to Apple building MacBooks there. My grandfather landed on D-Day and drove Volkswagen Beetles for most of his life. None of us know what will happen in the future. China could become a close ally. They’re already an existential economic partner. The only path to real privacy is personal sove…

> You are very naïve.

I am your of the same generation of your father...

My grandfather was already 40 years old when D-Day landed.

> None of us know what will happen in the future

It's safe to assume that it doesn't matter.

You could die tomorrow, so why are you worrying?

> If you don’t control the data it is public

Unless the network is firewalled by Chinese government...

Safety is not about paranoia, but about layers.

car alarms aren't there to make it impossible to steal your car, but only to make it inconvenient for the thief and convince them to steal someone else's car.

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

#79

Post by mulmen »

petee wrote: post #53
hosteur wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you not print naked adults?

One example would be protecting employees from someone just bringing in photos of themselves with the sole intent of exposing themselves to the employee, as they have a captive audience.

No post body was provided.

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

#80

Post by zerof1l »

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 $4.7 a month for 1TB storage, but then you don't have full control over it. Then there are quite nice NextCloud apps for Android and iOS that you can configure to sync your photos and videos into your cloud.
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