A Dad Took Photos of His Kid for the Doctor. Google Flagged Him as a Criminal

https://web.archive.org/web/20220821112541/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html

by carbolymer • 4 years ago

228 188 4 years ago

web.archive.org

josephcsible7• 4 years ago

It's been three months, and AFAIK, Google still hasn't given him his account back yet.

Overtonwindow• 4 years ago

That would require Google to at least tacitly Admit that they made a mistake.

duxup• 4 years ago

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.

gjsman-10005• 4 years ago

Forget that - Google states to the media they had reviewed the situation and had decided to uphold his ban.

Good luck convincing them to admit their “appeal” system, and their media review, were mistakes. Google is too arrogant for that.

Alupis11• 4 years ago

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.

googlryas3• 4 years ago

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

sekh602• 4 years ago

This story broke the camels back for us when it first appeared here and got us to migrate our email to protonmail and a domain we bought.

josephcsible7• 4 years ago

I wish we had a portable email address format, like phone numbers are, instead of being inherently tied to a provider.

layer84• 4 years ago

Owning a domain is close enough.

rosnd4• 4 years ago

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

startupsfail• 4 years ago

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.

chrismeller• 4 years ago

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

cgearhart• 4 years ago

migrate our email to protonmail

Any tips? It’s been on my lowest priority todo list to migrate off of gmail for several years, and I think the biggest reason I haven’t yet is that I know nothing about alternatives. I haven’t had to think at all about email for 15-20 years or so, and I’d like to keep it that way as much as possible after any switch. How close does protonmail get to that ideal?

qudat• 4 years ago

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.

funnymony• 4 years ago

Get your own dns record first.

Brian_K_White• 4 years ago

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.

sekh602• 4 years ago

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.

amatecha• 4 years ago

Yeah, this and someone I know getting burned for the same thing (we assume -- there was no concrete confirmation one way or the other) on another cloud provider. Putting "all your eggs in one basket" is just asking for disaster, as has been demonstrated over and over, unfortunately.

Waterluvian2• 4 years ago

This is the one that causes me to finally commit an entire weekend to getting off Google.

Because I have the exact same kinds of photos on my phone, auto-backed up to Google Photos, intended for his physician.

nehal3m• 4 years ago

NextCloud on a VPS works very well for me. The AIO setup does all the work for you: https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one

Barrin92• 4 years ago

what happened to the guy was awful but in general, don't ever store medical correspondence on Google cloud or send it over email or messengers. Here in the EU and I would be surprised if it's different in the US there's dedicated apps for telemedicine which are regulated like medical devices, so there's confidentiality, no storage or scanning of vieo or audio, and so on. Sucks but you can't really treat any other services as secure or private.

cozzyd2• 4 years ago

right but most people take pictures with their phones nowadays, which might automatically backup up to google photos.

Waterluvian2• 4 years ago

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.

xeromal• 4 years ago

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

wholinator2• 4 years ago

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.

afandian• 4 years ago

I don’t trust anyone with health data, honestly. Two examples from the UK:

Babylon data breach for UK GPs:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23471347

Palantir getting its teeth into the NHS:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56183785

Next time I need a doctors appointment I’ll do my best to make it in-person.

kodt2• 4 years ago

It sounds like a secure platform was likely used to send it to the doctor but the photos were taken on a phone and auto backed up to Google Photos and also texted to his wife’s iPhone.

bagels• 4 years ago

Does getting your google account blocked prevent you from using GCP? There are so many stories of people losing access to google accounts that it seems way too risky to use GCP when this sort of thing can happen.

gjsman-10005• 4 years ago

Potentially yes, if you use a personal account for GCP. Don’t do it.

If you have to use GCP, use a burner account… because Google is absolutely asinine right now.

I would not trust Google if they were a hired employee to turn on my sprinklers in the morning.

Edit: For this reason, I am actually all in favor of having GCP, AWS, Azure, etc declared utilities. Unless there is a crime, we have a right to an account. Your electricity company can’t cut you off whenever they feel like.

ronsor• 4 years ago

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

josephcsible7• 4 years ago

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?

kadoban• 4 years ago

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.

FeistySkink• 4 years ago

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.

autotune• 4 years ago

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.

walrus01• 4 years ago

imagine what happens if you use google's domain registrar services.

even if you were to run a domain name zonefile that pointed its MX at something non-google and had zero A records or CNAMEs pointing at things hosted on GCP, you'd still risk being unable to login or admin your domain.

fncivivue73• 4 years ago

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.

cypress663• 4 years ago

I don't know why people use gcp, I would like to hear some opinions.

The way I see it, if you don't mind price, you go with AWS (most polished). If you mind price gcp isn't really much cheaper, so you go with something actually cheap like OCI.

WaitWaitWha2• 4 years ago

OCI as in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure?

dddw• 4 years ago

kubernetes is nicely integrated in GCP

jiggawatts• 4 years ago

Azure doesn't exist, apparently.

falcolas• 4 years ago

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

Cynically, fairly typical vendor lock-in.

dorgo• 4 years ago

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

WaitWaitWha2• 4 years ago

How does this work with Android mobile devices that are linked to that account?

From a non-technologist perspective, is a linked Android device becomes neutered?

pohuing2• 4 years ago

You can use android phones without a Google account right

markdown• 4 years ago

Shit, this gave me pause.

My dog has crypto* and my vet asked me to send him pics at various states of arousal so I have numerous pics of dog junk on my phone.

* Cryptorchidism is the medical term that refers to the failure of one or both testicles (testes) to descend into the scrotum.

layer84• 4 years ago

Thanks for the footnote, it’s quite confusing otherwise. :)

kodt2• 4 years ago

I just figured his dog had its own bitcoin wallet.

rosnd4• 4 years ago

This is such a weird story. Is google really using computer vision to detect CSAM? How could that possibly work? This seems like a tremendous technical challenge.

Usually photoDNA has been deployed for this, but that almost certainly wouldn't be triggered by the dad uploading his own photos that hadn't been previously marked as CSAM in the photoDNA database.

mopsi2• 4 years ago

Everyone's using AI, and widely. I sell stuff online and sync a product feed to Facebook. Products often get banned based on image analysis. Sometimes it is reasonably close, eg darts getting classified as dangerous weapons, other times sneakers get that classification.

If I appeal, it usually gets overturned, but sometimes sneakers get confirmed as weapons after review. There seems to be no image history; when a previously whitelisted product gets imported again (with a minor change in description or something), it may get classified as weapon again.

Needless to say, my ad spend is now zero and I expect my account to get banned any moment.

Fuzzy AI-based image analysis is OK for things like extracting roof shapes from aerial images, but seems totally inadequate for moderation, because it lacks nuance and context.

culanuchachamim• 4 years ago

Original thread 3 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32538805

jack7e• 4 years ago

+1 for the archive link

baggy_trough• 4 years ago

Outrageous and unacceptable.

9991• 4 years ago

Then don't accept it. Null route Google in your hosts file and move on with your life.

wastedimage• 4 years ago

lrvick5• 4 years ago

Google will not lose any significant number of users no matter how shitty they are, because most people have no idea how to leave.

orangepurple2• 4 years ago

Google doesn't give a damn if you leave unless you are a ad spend whale. If you're not spending at least a million a month on ads you are just a drop in the ocean for Google.

fersarr• 4 years ago

So, basically if I have disabled cloud backups in google photos, this shouldn't affect me right?

loeg2• 4 years ago

For now they don't scan the contents of your phone, yes. If that changes, potentially no.

lrvick5• 4 years ago

Do not send them via plaintext email, or a proprietary chat system. Also be aware that other corpo apps on your phone may harvest and back them up too or scan them in place. US cell carriers require extensive root access malware like OMA-DM toolkits that can be triggered to spy on anything on your phone at any time.

As long as you use proprietary software on your devices you will never be safe from this type of thing.

Herbstluft• 4 years ago

Aside from the fact that Google likes to randomly lock longtime users out of their accounts too sometimes, yes. Those cases happen unprompted.

formerly_proven• 4 years ago

Mark did not remember this video and no longer had access to it, but he said it sounded like a private moment he would have been inspired to capture, not realizing it would ever be viewed or judged by anyone else.

Recontextualisation is one hell of a drug.

drewmol2• 4 years ago

Yeah I wouldn’t be surprised if they were asleep in the video and that’s what Google still had issue with. Perhaps not but if so, it would explain things a bit better.

hnbad2• 4 years ago

Honestly? My son is two years old and sleeps in the same bed as us. All three of us also don't like being too warm so during the summer months he would sometimes only wear his diapers and we would only wear underpants. It's not clear from the description what the video shows exactly but apparently the police didn't consider it a problem. If I had captured a moment of my son doing something cute while we're still in bed, that would have fit the description.

LAC-Tech• 4 years ago

Thanks for the reminder.

Wife and I take a lot of photos of our newborn, including in the bath. We think nothing of it, but probably worth figuring out a digital plan.

cpcallen• 4 years ago

Use a film camera and develop the film yourself.

lostapathy• 4 years ago

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

hnbad2• 4 years ago

Same. I make an effort to choose angles that aren't too "revealing" but this got very difficult with video rather than photos. It's extremely disturbing to have to consider what a US company might consider "pornographic" when recording an entirely non-sexual interaction with your own child but here we are.

If the idea of an AI flagging an innocent moment wasn't bad enough, I can't stomach the idea of having to appeal this by literally having a stranger review a private moment in order to determine if it was sexual abuse. This just seems like an unjustifiable invasion of privacy.

Cameri• 4 years ago

That Google snoops and watches your video, photos and emails should not be a surprise to anyone in 2022. If your entire online identity is tied to a string that ends in @gmail.com they own you.

jacob0192• 4 years ago

These stories of people being banned by google without recourse are so common, it's amazing that anyone here is still using google for anything important. First of all, get off of gmail. If you do nothing else, get off of gmail. I'm very happy with fastmail, they provide email, calendar, contacts, notes, and some cloud storage for a monthly fee.

I've also come to love nextcloud, I started using it to replace google photos, but there are tons of other great features too. I use it for photos, notes, calendar, contacts, news, and some collaboration stuff. It's open source, you can self-host, or get a hosted account somewhere.

While you're degoogling, start using duckduckgo for search. It's a better experience than google these days, and if you really want to send a query over to google, just add !g to the end of the search.

Get off of Chrome too. I would prefer that you use firefox, but chromium works fine too.

Getting off of google voice took a bit more work. I ported my number to Telnyx, wrote a SMS-to-XMPP bridge, and set up Asterisk to route voice calls. I'm happy with that solution but it won't be practical for most, so maybe someone else can comment on google voice alternatives.

InCityDreams• 4 years ago

I would prefer that you use firefox, but chromium works fine too.

The rest of your comment seems fair, and equally very interesting, and I'll follow up with fastmail and nextcloud - thanks, but just the particular "I would prefer that you....", seemed jarringly out of place, and made me somewhat happier I use [a heavily customised] Brave [with a very edited hosts file], for no other good reason than ff just doesn't do it for me, as much as I've tried, and tried to like it.

jacob0192• 4 years ago

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.

pyuser5832• 4 years ago

Stratechery covered this … they pointed out the really f*ed: part: Google is refusing to reinstate the account.

Protecting children is important. AI is imperfect.

But there is no reason the keep the account suspended once it’s clear there was no wrongdoing.

This man is innocent of doing anything wrong. Google had suspended him, and removed access to all his online account data. And refuses to reinstate.

We balance out liberties with responsibilities all the time. We allow the state power to protect children, and corporations have the right to assist them.

There are careful balancing acts being done.

But there is no balancing act here. There is no justification for Googles action.

gjsman-10005• 4 years ago

This is the part that should receive a Congressional inquiry. I would love to see Congress drag Sundar Pichai (and no one else) before them and scream “What the hell is wrong with you?” in his face.

We have courts for a reason. They found no wrongdoing. Google is objectively deciding they know better than an elected court on what happened.

This whole situation is absurd and evil.

lrvick5• 4 years ago

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.

josephcsible7• 4 years ago

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.

gonehome2• 4 years ago

IIRC there was a follow up which was arguably worse.

Google implied that the account was suspended because of real CSAM concerns unrelated to the photos sent to the doctor/police officer (other photos in their account? they wouldn't go into details about their decision) and that the officer closing the case doesn't mean their judgement here is wrong.

If that's the case I can understand why they're obstinate about their decision (which otherwise would seem like a dumb mistake they should just reverse), but the problem is none of this happens in a place where users have any ability to get reinstated or have any sort of control over their digital life - there's no real path any individual has out of this even after going to the press. 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.

The user also losing all related account access (two factor, email, etc.) is particularly bad. This is also categorically different from Apple's approach which compared hashes of CSAM with what's in the NCMEC database which would not have caused this mistake (here Google is using computer vision to discover and flag novel images).

trasz2• 4 years ago

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

skissane3• 4 years ago

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.)

Buttons840• 4 years ago

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.

fncivivue73• 4 years ago

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.

thecoppinger• 4 years ago

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.

rmbyrro2• 4 years ago

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

dmix• 4 years ago

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.

shadowgovt• 4 years ago

I'm not normally one to indulge conspiracy theories.

... But given the situation and high profile nature of this incident?

If that account's still locked, it's locked under sealed FBI warrant.

Google has had situations where they work hand-in-give with law enforcement to resolve something, and when they do, they're radio-silent on the situation. Sometimes for years, given the scope.

annoyingnoob2• 4 years ago

This is what software as law looks like. The software actually found one or more pictures of a nude child and banned the account - the software worked exactly as intended. As humans we can see the issue here, the software cannot see or understand the issue. Google is not about to start carving exceptions out of its government mandated or coerced scanning feature, it can only follow the rule that any nudity involving children is bad.

_aavaa_2• 4 years ago

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

wvenable• 4 years ago

But there is no reason the keep the account suspended once it’s clear there was no wrongdoing.

For you, Google is your everything. For Google, you're an tiny ant. If a tiny ant steps out of line, they kill it. They don't feel bad about the ant; they don't feel anything. It's a free service and it's not worth the cost to literally do anything.

867-53092• 4 years ago

Protecting children is important. AI is imperfect.

is protecting children more important than a software engineer with no backup's mistakes and first world inconveniences? yes.

the AI did its job flawlessly - detected a naked toddler. as did the human verifier. bravo. should it have been detected and flagged? yes.

should we be surprised at the chosen free cloud provider's attitude or dismissal? no.

watwut• 4 years ago

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.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 4 years ago

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

einpoklum2• 4 years ago

Protecting children is important.

Google protecting children is not important.

This man is innocent of doing anything wrong

He is not entirely without fault: He negligently enabled surveillance of his personal files, including allowing Google to make copies of his son's genitalia / his son's private personal medicall information. He's not exactly innocent - but of course, his misdeed is not vis-a-vis the state or Google, but vis-a-vis his son, his wife and himself.

We allow the state power to protect children

You don't allow the state anything. The state allows itself and you pretend we control the state because we get to make some choices via elections every once in a while.

warbler735• 4 years ago

Apple's Photos app tried to tell me that my child was my lover in their photo event labeling, which really pissed me off a lot.

dzhiurgis3• 4 years ago

I think i had something like that. If you do “review more photos” too much and your pretty similar to your partner - you will get this.

morgosmaci• 4 years ago

It was removed but there was a discussion about a similar account over on the Photos reddit this week. https://old.reddit.com/r/googlephotos/comments/yzz03x/it_loo...

hellfish• 4 years ago

After setting up a Gmail account in the mid-aughts, Mark, who is in his 40s, came to rely heavily on Google. He synced appointments with his wife on Google Calendar. His Android smartphone camera backed up his photos and videos to the Google cloud. He even had a phone plan with Google Fi.

His first mistake. He (and a whole bunch of others) forgot the principle of least privilege. The moment you start letting a company like google domesticate your usage patterns, you're essentially their bitch from that point onward. Better to keep all of their stuff compartmentalized

ssss11• 4 years ago

Sadly I think everyone in the 00’s incorrectly assumed these companies having custody of our data didn’t equal them monitoring the data.

The time has long passed since we should have left Google services if we care at all about privacy.

einpoklum2• 4 years ago

Google flagged him
Mark’s wife grabbed her husband’s phone and texted a few high-quality close-ups of their son’s groin area to her iPhone
Gmail account ... Mark ... came to rely heavily on Google ... appointments ... on Google Calendar... smartphone camera backed up his photos ... to the Google cloud. ... Google Fi.

The photos should never have been made visible to third parties, certainly not large nosy corporations which analyze you and your behavior and "flag" people (and also share info with the NSA or other US government agencies, as per the Snowden revelations). We must educate people around us not to just use these gratis software services naively. Of course, the defaults of what's installed and configured on the gadgets we buy is something that many will stick with despite our best efforts - but remember that all of this would never have happened if Mark had not _actively_ allowed it: If he had simply never had a Google account, or never entered its credentials into his, phone, this whole situation would have been averted.

So, tell your friends, tell your family members, tell yourselves:

* Putting something "on the cloud" means giving a third party, whom you can't trust, a copy of it.

* When you send someone an email, it's like you've sent a copy to the company which runs his email service. If its @gmail.com - imagine your email is placed on large placards in Google's lobby.

* Minimize the use of services by large multi-pronged companies like Google, to avoid surveillance.

... and all of above for Apple, their iTunes cloud, email and other services. Finally,

* Prefer privacy-respecting communications applications like Signal for sending messages.

Linux_Watcher• 4 years ago

Old News

dang2• 4 years ago

Please don't post archive.org links when the original URL works or there's a good alternate source available.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Ptchd4• 4 years ago

It's to avoid pay walls....

skissane3• 4 years ago

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.

dang2• 4 years ago

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

A Dad Took Photos of His Kid for the Doctor. Google Flagged Him as a Criminal

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