Google Ignores Police, Defies Authority. Must Read!

[Finax]

To put it simply, a man took photos of his sons genitalia to send to a doctor online and was false-flagged by google, which auto-backs up his photo to the photo cloud service. The Police determined him innocent after a child abuse investigation, but google still asserts the power and authority to permanently shut down all his accounts, including his active phone number service (Google Fi). 
 

Google’s reasoning is that they personally looked at all his photos and found a video he took of his wife sleeping naked in bed with his sleeping son in the morning. So they continue to keep his account banned. 
 

here’s a link to the article.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html

 

Google’s ability to defy Police Judgment is scary, and their position to snoop through auto-backed up photos of people even after innocent cases like this one gives them too much power in my opinion. What do you think? 
 

Some people make their money from using google products, so a permanent ban on accounts can be very damaging and disruptive to a persons lively hood, especially when Google is this big and prevalent in people’s lives.

 

 

 

 

[aurum]

19 minutes ago, Finax said:

Google’s ability to defy Police Judgment is scary, and their position to snoop through auto-backed up photos of people even after innocent cases like this one gives them too much power in my opinion. What do you think? 

I think you’re being paranoid. Your privacy is not that important. And google is not “defying” the police. The police didn’t demand google do anything.

I’d say if anything this is just bad customer service. One of like a billion bad customer services events that every day. It’s not illegal and it’s not really news.

Also this happened like almost a year ago. So I’m not sure why we are bringing it up now.

[Danioover9000]

@Finax

16 hours ago, Finax said:

To put it simply, a man took photos of his sons genitalia to send to a doctor online and was false-flagged by google, which auto-backs up his photo to the photo cloud service. The Police determined him innocent after a child abuse investigation, but google still asserts the power and authority to permanently shut down all his accounts, including his active phone number service (Google Fi). 
 

Google’s reasoning is that they personally looked at all his photos and found a video he took of his wife sleeping naked in bed with his sleeping son in the morning. So they continue to keep his account banned. 
 

here’s a link to the article.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html

 

Google’s ability to defy Police Judgment is scary, and their position to snoop through auto-backed up photos of people even after innocent cases like this one gives them too much power in my opinion. What do you think? 
 

Some people make their money from using google products, so a permanent ban on accounts can be very damaging and disruptive to a persons lively hood, especially when Google is this big and prevalent in people’s lives.

 

 

 

 

   I think they should try to pull this tactic within China, see how far their policies protect them against the CCP. They think they're safe because they're worth billions, well, wait until they become a national threat, I guarantee they might get canceled and shut down. 

[Danioover9000]

@aurum

16 hours ago, aurum said:

I think you’re being paranoid. Your privacy is not that important. And google is not “defying” the police. The police didn’t demand google do anything.

I’d say if anything this is just bad customer service. One of like a billion bad customer services events that every day. It’s not illegal and it’s not really news.

Also this happened like almost a year ago. So I’m not sure why we are bringing it up now.

   BECAUSE IT SUCKS TO HAVE YOUR ACCOUNT BANNED! And the Dad was doing that for medical reasons, to provide to the doctor, so why is it their issue????

[Danioover9000]

@Finax  I can't even access the article apparently I've reached my 'free limit' of viewing the article. Apparently, in the USA in the land of freedom, where free journalism and reporting is practiced I am not free to view their articles and got to pay. Hypocrites. The New York Times SUCK.

[aurum]

9 minutes ago, Danioover9000 said:

@aurum

   BECAUSE IT SUCKS TO HAVE YOUR ACCOUNT BANNED! And the Dad was doing that for medical reasons, to provide to the doctor, so why is it their issue????

I didn’t say it didn’t suck for the dad. I admitted it’s bad customer service, and obviously I wouldn’t want that to happen to me.

I’m simply saying OP is paranoid and overblowing the issue.

[Danioover9000]

@aurum

18 minutes ago, aurum said:

I didn’t say it didn’t suck for the dad. I admitted it’s bad customer service, and obviously I wouldn’t want that to happen to me.

I’m simply saying OP is paranoid and overblowing the issue.

   Okay sure, sorry for the caps, it can just be annoying, and sometime, rare, that this could be life changing as well. It would've been worse if the Dad was charged for this too. He's cleared by the police, the charges are dropped, I don't know if his record gets cleaned too, but Google should have got their shit together, and just drop the case, activate his account, and give an apology for the overreaction. To me, the banning of his account and phone number, after the charges were cleared, was bad customer service but even phobic, don't know what kind, maybe even Racist/sexist or anything if we know a bit more.

@Finax Was this a high profile case? I'd think it would have been given the nature of the crimes? 

[Leo Gura]

Google has the authority to ban you from their services. That is irrelevant to the police do.

Obviously Google will ban some people too hastily, as all platforms do, because perfect moderation is impossible.

If anything, this shows how vigilant Google is about child porn. Can you imagine how much child porn they ban from their servers every month? Terabytes of it

Edited March 10, 2023 by Leo Gura

[Finax]

On 3/9/2023 at 1:40 AM, aurum said:

I think you’re being paranoid. Your privacy is not that important. And google is not “defying” the police. The police didn’t demand google do anything.

I’d say if anything this is just bad customer service. One of like a billion bad customer services events that every day. It’s not illegal and it’s not really news.

Also this happened like almost a year ago. So I’m not sure why we are bringing it up now.

 
@aurum Why is privacy not important?
 

And I am bringing this up now because I was curious for some answers and the time when the article was made does not interest me.

 

@Danioover9000 High profile case as in court case? there was no case because the victim deemed it not worth spending thousands trying to sue Google. Although I do believe he has a legitimate case. If the government can’t ban a person for no good reason, then a tech giant should follow the same principles seriously.

Edited March 10, 2023 by Finax

[aurum]

33 minutes ago, Finax said:

Why is privacy not important?

I didn’t say it’s not important at all. It’s important to some degree.

What I said was that your privacy is not as important as your post suggested.

You suggested that google is overreaching by being able to see your photos and cancel your account. And I don’t agree. Google cannot and should not allow its millions of users to host illegal files. The FBI would shut down Google in no time.

99.9% of users will never have a problem. Only when people do something obviously egregious like hosting potential child porn will there be problems. Or in a case like this where there was a legitimate mixup.

Granted, I’d still like for Google to reinstate the dad’s account. Seems like the right thing to do since he was innocent. But that’s separate from the issue of whether Google should have the authority to see your photos and flag them.

[Danioover9000]

@Finax

59 minutes ago, Finax said:

 
@aurum Why is privacy not important?
 

And I am bringing this up now because I was curious for some answers and the time when the article was made does not interest me.

 

@Danioover9000 High profile case as in court case? there was no case because the victim deemed it not worth spending thousands trying to sue Google. Although I do believe he has a legitimate case. If the government can’t ban a person for no good reason, then a tech giant should follow the same principles seriously.

   When I think about it, I meant it in both ways: High profile case for his 'pedophilia' of sending his son's genitalia to doctor, and high profile case for suing Google's banning of his account. It's presumptuous of me or you assuming many factors of his value system, cognitive and moral development, personality types, states of being, other lines of development in various areas of life and indoctrinations he had and other ideologies, even assuming his financial situation, but I really think he should've taken them to court and really fought back. Regardless if he lost, he'd learn from that experience, and the company thinks twice of banning account with loose justifications, like with Leo Gura.

[Danioover9000]

@Finax

1 hour ago, Finax said:

 
@aurum Why is privacy not important?
 

And I am bringing this up now because I was curious for some answers and the time when the article was made does not interest me.

 

@Danioover9000 High profile case as in court case? there was no case because the victim deemed it not worth spending thousands trying to sue Google. Although I do believe he has a legitimate case. If the government can’t ban a person for no good reason, then a tech giant should follow the same principles seriously.

   My opinion, but privacy is important is relative to other factors involved within context and outside of context. If privacy was important and over enforced over the public space, we won't have and exhibitionists and voyeurs now would we?

[Danioover9000]

@aurum

32 minutes ago, aurum said:

I didn’t say it’s not important at all. It’s important to some degree.

What I said was that your privacy is not as important as your post suggested.

You suggested that google is overreaching by being able to see your photos and cancel your account. And I don’t agree. Google cannot and should not allow its millions of users to host illegal files. The FBI would shut down Google in no time.

99.9% of users will never have a problem. Only when people do something obviously egregious like hosting potential child porn will there be problems. Or in a case like this where there was a legitimate mixup.

Granted, I’d still like for Google to reinstate the dad’s account. Seems like the right thing to do since he was innocent. But that’s separate from the issue of whether Google should have the authority to see your photos and flag them.

   Which makes this situation unfortunate and tragic, because we do want to make Google a bit more accountable for their actions, but then when they should correct a certain specific action, they don't want to because PR or other factors in or out of context. I mean, how do we solve this problem to start, when a proper, deep and broad solution, only solves half the problem? Never mind the perfect solution when our information ecology has lots of misinformation and distorted facts, even taboo topics that we'd rather not engage with fully.

   How do we prevent mix ups like this from happening in the future? Taking the situation, we'd say "Well, the father has letters from his hospital, by the doctor, to ask him to send a picture of his son's genitalia, for his upcoming medical examination or whatever medical procedure. So, he is justified in sending those pictures in a secure folder over to that doctor, and google should not intervene between the ongoing doctor and patient relationship.", so that's one solution, allow a stronger encryption or a special file that prevents google from interfering. Of course, this solution can backfire collectively, because now scammers and fraudsters would just make up a medical stuff and use this encryption or whatever. Tricky.

   So, how do we resolve this issue, in the future?

[Danioover9000]

@Leo Gura @Finax @aurum Actually, I have a personal anecdote of a similar situation. I had an accident with my finger, and the skin cut on my third knuckle on a corner. Took a week and a half to heal completely, but what I could've done is contacted the NHS and my GP about this accident, and book an appointment, which is mostly what happens. Hypothetically, my GP could've asked for a photo of my injury to be sent over as well, and I use my google account to do so, and Google could've restricted my account for sharing a graphic image of an injury or something. Jesus, this could've been me as well, my account would've been banned too!!!???

[Leo Gura]

@Danioover9000 Why are you comparing a cut finger with child nudity??

[Emerald]

3 hours ago, Danioover9000 said:

@Leo Gura @Finax @aurum Actually, I have a personal anecdote of a similar situation. I had an accident with my finger, and the skin cut on my third knuckle on a corner. Took a week and a half to heal completely, but what I could've done is contacted the NHS and my GP about this accident, and book an appointment, which is mostly what happens. Hypothetically, my GP could've asked for a photo of my injury to be sent over as well, and I use my google account to do so, and Google could've restricted my account for sharing a graphic image of an injury or something. Jesus, this could've been me as well, my account would've been banned too!!!???

This is a silly comparison.

Google isn’t going to ban your account for a picture of a cut finger.

The reason why they banned the guy’s account is because they thought he had child porn on it.

[Danioover9000]

@Emerald

1 minute ago, Emerald said:

This is a silly comparison.

Google isn’t going to ban your account for a picture of a cut finger.

The reason why they banned the guy’s account is because they thought he had child porn on it.

   The whole point of that comparison and anecdote I was getting to, is that this can happen regardless of how innocent or secure your files are. Google was overreacting, despite their justified ban, it's not valid to me, especially the case, again from OP's post, saying that the case was closed and the guy's innocent and cleared BY LAW. I say Google overstepped, and I think they should reactivate his account with an apology, especially as is we don't know if that's a patient and doctor relationship and that his son has medical treatment, and needed contact via the internet to the doctor, grounds of doctor and patient. I don't know if Google's jurisdiction covers confidential patient and doctor stuff over the internet, assuming this is under medical confidentiality.

    

[Danioover9000]

@Emerald

9 minutes ago, Emerald said:

This is a silly comparison.

Google isn’t going to ban your account for a picture of a cut finger.

The reason why they banned the guy’s account is because they thought he had child porn on it.

   Say that to YouTube, who took down a video that showed a knife wound, without any warnings or disclaimers by VICE. 

[caspex]

7 minutes ago, Danioover9000 said:

@Emerald

   The whole point of that comparison and anecdote I was getting to, is that this can happen regardless of how innocent or secure your files are. Google was overreacting, despite their justified ban, it's not valid to me, especially the case, again from OP's post, saying that the case was closed and the guy's innocent and cleared BY LAW. I say Google overstepped, and I think they should reactivate his account with an apology, especially as is we don't know if that's a patient and doctor relationship and that his son has medical treatment, and needed contact via the internet to the doctor, grounds of doctor and patient. I don't know if Google's jurisdiction covers confidential patient and doctor stuff over the internet, assuming this is under medical confidentiality.

    

I think Google's reaction was justified, while the guy should be unbanned and it is unfair to the guy since he meant no harm, I'd rather Google react like this to child nudity than the alternative

Also comparing a cut finger is not a very good comparison. Child nudity is orders of magnitude more serious than that.

[aurum]

3 hours ago, Danioover9000 said:

The whole point of that comparison and anecdote I was getting to, is that this can happen regardless of how innocent or secure your files are. 

But that's not the case.

A cut finger is not going to trigger any google alarms. No one cares about that. But a child's genitalia can and should trigger those alarms.

7 hours ago, Danioover9000 said:

 So, how do we resolve this issue, in the future?

I think the only thing Google didn't do correctly here was reinstate the guy's account. So that's really the only problem to remedy. Perhaps Google needs to funnel more resources towards handling appeals for wrongly banned accounts. Hard to say exactly.