A Dad Took Photos of His Kid for the Doctor. Google Flagged Him as a Criminal (opens in new tab)

Post the actual URI, then put archive URI in comment. If it helps people (with paywalls or hug of death or whatever) people will often upvote it and it will achieve a reasonably prominent position among the comments.

skissane is correct—archive links are welcome in the thread, but it's important that the submission be the original source.

"Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Owning a domain is close enough.

You don’t own a phone number either. Ever tried to move between countries?

This. There should be anti-monopoly regulation that would state that e-mail addresses belong to users, just like the phone numbers or domain names.

Buy a domain name, now you have a portable email address.

Protonmail has an import from gmail feature that worked well. Not that I practice inbox zero, so the amount of mail I had to transfer was very little. My wife's inbox is a disaster, sometimes I go in there to trim things down, but I have little advice there. Try to practice good email hygiene.

Me too, and I have been a sysadmin and developer for almaot 30 years and know exactly what to do and even I still haven't gotten around to it. But every ordinary not-even-in-IT person is supposed to navigate all that? It's preposterous.

I use Fastmail and love it.

The key is not to forward your email from gmail and just start fresh. Slowly migrate all comms and eventually you’ll never look at that email again.

Get your own dns record first.

Wasn't there something like the guy searching for CP before the photo was uploaded, or something along those lines?

It might be worth remembering we only have one side of the story here. How do we know we can thoroughly trust the Dad any more than we can thoroughly trust Google? Perhaps there are more pictures Dad took the article doesn't know about? Perhaps Google can't verify it was indeed Dad's child in the images?

Perhaps there is more to the story than what the article lets on...perhaps not. We will never really know.

Or that one guy who can restore accounts to get to it.

There’s no apparent customer service system so I suspect the whole process is informal to some extent.

Anecdotal, but I know somebody who got their personal Google account blocked and then the company they work for GCP account blocked just because their names "looked" the same as somebody else's on the sanction list, even though it was a different person. I'm not sure they ever got the personal one back.

Google aggressively links accounts together. If you ever hire someone who was banned by big G, kiss everything goodbye.

Doesn't Google famously link accounts that have ever had anything to do with each other, and ban them as a group? I recall some businesses getting their play store accounts banned because some dev did sketchy stuff separately, or the other way around.

> If you have to use GCP, use a burner account

Does that actually help? Don't they collect enough of your data to be able to correlate accounts?

GCP is so awful to deal with directly their sales people ghost you after you submit your LLC info to raise limits. Then the sales person you were working with initially gets sacked, and weeks later a new one comes on board and tries to pick up where you left off again.

Usually, it’s because someone bought into GAE, and needed some flexibility for extensions to that app.

Cynically, fairly typical vendor lock-in.

afaik there is no alternative to BigQuery on AWS? All alternatives are less managed and require more administration. But I never looked too closely.

kubernetes is nicely integrated in GCP

OCI as in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure?

Azure doesn't exist, apparently.

You can use android phones without a Google account right

This is why I pay extra for domains on gandi and avoid google owned TLDs. I also won't touch namecheap anymore for the same concerns just too much downside risk even if the chance is small.

It wouldn't take much for Google to turn this around, that's the really screwed up part. All the would have to do to regain trust is come out and admit their system did something wrong and provide recourse for resolution in these cases. Instead they just double down and hope people forget.

I just figured his dog had its own bitcoin wallet.

Digital camera would be fine too. Some photo printers can print direct from an SD card without any PC or network connection.

And the supermajority of users of this set of systems and features are entirely technically unaware of how to micromanage it.

To them, they have a phone that backs up to the cloud.

I figure it's probably not typical but I disable every single piece of tracking possible and disallow any external cloud storage on every device I have. I just don't actually have a need to give Google thousands of my photographs and access to every piece of my personal history. The benefit would be marginal and the cost is unlikely but potentially catastrophic. (And seemingly more likely every year). Every new device I get I go through every setting and turn off all the new bullshit they've put in to steal my privacy, because they do constantly add to the attack surface.

Sounds like there almost needs to be an incognito mode for cameras.

> There's no due process, no way to defend yourself, no way to get them to show how they made their decision. As I understand it you have no rights beyond the ToS.

This is where legislation is required. Mass-scale social media/cloud providers/etc are effectively public utilities, and you should be able to challenge their decisions in court - the current situation is as bad as if the electricity company could disconnect you for non-specific reasons and you had no reasonable prospects of a successful legal challenge to their decision.

(Such regulation should be limited to providers above a certain size-maybe a cutoff like 10 million MAU or 500 million annual revenue-so small players aren’t burdened by it.)

That's spin. The real reason is discussed near the end of the article.

They don't want to get into the business of deciding what is and isn't sexual imagery. Instead, it's easier to just ban people and forget about it.

It's the same type of behaviour and attitude that lead to damoore being fired. No room for ambiguity or nuance at Google. Everything can be decided by an algorithm.

Zero transparency and zero due process is a massively underrated feature of big tech censorship/policing.

It's one thing to debate the benefits that society gets for removing/flagging content, but the costs are immediately 10x higher when the false positives have zero recourse.

Even 'legitimate' cases often can't speak to a human to find out why or how they were flagged (unless they have influence). The public can't find out what motives/reasoning or who was behind certain content being removed. So it feeds into conspiracies and builds resentment.

Morally speaking, once a company becomes big enough they should owe a minimal standard of customer service to society.

I'd hope to see this covered under anti-trust laws (not a lawyer though, don't know the laws or their applicability). There's only one Google, and Google had quite the monopoly on being Google. They're big enough to be either regulated or broken up.

I wonder what images they used to train an AI to recognize a child penis.

There is no reason for Google to not be lying about it.

I faced a somewhat similar predicament earlier this year.

I still have no idea how, but my 2FA enabled Facebook account (with a unique and secure password) was compromised while I was sleeping. Shortly after, the attacker started using my Business Manager account to run ads for fake products on their scam stores.

Here's the catch: my personal Facebook account was permanently banned right away, but my Business Manager account wasn't.

How? According to other folks who had the same done to them around that time, the attackers would upload CSAM content on your timeline so that you get immediately banned/locked out.

Well, that means I could no longer retrieve/change my business manager account, which gave the attacker free reign to run ads for about a month. To some degree this means that Facebooks CSAM system gives the attackers a way to compromise Business Manager accounts more efficiently.

I submitted a ban appeal, but didn't hear back. I read online that if you have an Oculus, reaching out via their support is the only real option, so I did just that.

I wrote down a detailed account of the timeline of events, along with screenshots etc., and sent it to an Oculus support agent. In fact, they thanked me during the interaction or providing 'the most detailed' report they'd seen.

The evidence was pretty clear: at 5am or so, someone had logged in to my account via a foreign IP, change my email to a Chinese address and added a hardware 2FA key. The ads they were running to scam stores were often in Chinese, too. Not exactly a difficult case to crack.

They assured me I'd hear back within 7 days, but a month or so later I received an automated email from Facebook stating that the time for my appeal had expired, so the account would stay permanently banned.

That was mildly infuriating, given I never heard back from anyone.

What did losing my Facebook account mean to me?

As much as I'd been considering moving off social media, it briefly ruined my life.

* I'd had my account since I was 13 years old in 2008. I had a few thousand connections on there, many fleeting and superficial, but at least a few hundred with folks around the world that I care about and have no way of reaching now.

* 90% of communication here in NZ transpires via Facebook Messenger, so I was immediately cut off from my community and friends. What's worse, many have since told me that they were worried I'd blocked them.

* My income from the time came from selling trading cards in FB groups while I was closing an investment round. I lost the ability to do so, and had to move out of my apartment to live outside of the city with my in-laws.

* My father passed away a few years ago, and I had countless photos of him on my account, as well as our message history. This honestly hurt more than anything else.

All in all, this experience has left me a deep scar. I guess I needed to learn a lesson around not relying on one platform so heavily, and to some extent not backing things up such as the photos, but I really wish Facebook could have just done the reasonable thing and let me back in.

Finally, I have no idea if I was reported to the police/LE in any capacity regarding whatever was posted on my account to have me banned. Am I on some kind of list now?

A boring, technocratic dystopia.

edit: on the off chance anyone from Meta reads this and thinks they can help, I would be over the moon to get even a chance of having my account restored. I was told to speak to an Australian law firm who charge $3,500 to hound Facebook to get accounts restored in situations like mine, but unfortunately that's just not within my means.

Expect that the software did not work as intended. It’s intended to identify child sexual abuse material and this was not that.

Remember Google can ban any account at any time for any reason including because they just do not like you.

No Google software, devices, or data on their systems belongs to you. Sue them and they will remind you of this fact in detail.

If you want to own your digital life you will have to commit to being a pariah in your social circle that is ridiculed constantly for using open source tools.

> Sundar Pichai (and no one else)

I'd go a little broader than that. I'd also want to see them drag in whoever made the decision to not reinstate the account, plus everyone who knew what happened and could have overridden the decision but chose not to do so.

CSAM stands for Child Sexual Abuse Material. It was not CSAM, quite the opposite actually.

Maybe naked toddlers should not be flagged? You can see naked toddlers bathing in lakes and such. They are naked, cause overwhelming majority if people dont see toddlers as sexual and they themselves are not ashamed of body yet.

Naked pre-teen? Sure flag absolutely. Toddler? No.

That's fair, I just think it's a shame that Firefox's market share has grown so low. It's still my favorite. I also believe that Blink hegemony is bad for open web standards. Use what you want, but not chrome.