Google is a harsh mistress

As much as I admire the free services Google provides, I do think it's faceless approach to customer service is a real worry.  

I mean, I did try to contact it once with respect to a real, work related problem, and I was deemed not worthy of response.   

But this story from the New York Times, of people who have been cast into the darkness due to being inappropriately labelled as having saved child porn, is a bit of an eye opener about relying too much on everything Google.  

Long story short - a guy (with his wife's knowledge) takes a photo of his toddler boy's infected genitalia for a doctor's televideo consult, which does happen (and there is a record of that and the treatment provided.)  The photo, however, gets automatically backed up into Google's cloud, and an automated AI system tags it as child porn, and the father automatically loses access to his Google accounts.   Appeals have no success.

As the article notes:

...in 2018, when Google developed an artificially intelligent tool that could recognize never-before-seen exploitative images of children. That meant finding not just known images of abused children but images of unknown victims who could potentially be rescued by the authorities. Google made its technology available to other companies, including Facebook....

A human content moderator for Google would have reviewed the photos after they were flagged by the artificial intelligence to confirm they met the federal definition of child sexual abuse material. When Google makes such a discovery, it locks the user’s account, searches for other exploitative material and, as required by federal law, makes a report to the CyberTipline at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

The nonprofit organization has become the clearinghouse for abuse material; it received 29.3 million reports last year, or about 80,000 reports a day. Fallon McNulty, who manages the CyberTipline, said most of these are previously reported images, which remain in steady circulation on the internet. So her staff of 40 analysts focuses on potential new victims, so they can prioritize those cases for law enforcement....

In December 2021, Mark received a manila envelope in the mail from the San Francisco Police Department. It contained a letter informing him that he had been investigated as well as copies of the search warrants served on Google and his internet service provider. An investigator, whose contact information was provided, had asked for everything in Mark’s Google account: his internet searches, his location history, his messages and any document, photo and video he’d stored with the company.

The search, related to “child exploitation videos,” had taken place in February, within a week of his taking the photos of his son.

Mark called the investigator, Nicholas Hillard, who said the case was closed. Mr. Hillard had tried to get in touch with Mark but his phone number and email address hadn’t worked.

“I determined that the incident did not meet the elements of a crime and that no crime occurred,” Mr. Hillard wrote in his report. The police had access to all the information Google had on Mark and decided it did not constitute child abuse or exploitation.

Mark asked if Mr. Hillard could tell Google that he was innocent so he could get his account back.

“You have to talk to Google,” Mr. Hillard said, according to Mark. “There’s nothing I can do.”

Mark appealed his case to Google again, providing the police report, but to no avail. After getting a notice two months ago that his account was being permanently deleted, Mark spoke with a lawyer about suing Google and how much it might cost.

“I decided it was probably not worth $7,000,” he said.

 It's kind of nuts that Google doesn't listen to appeals about incidents like this.

Update:   I was thinking of this last night, and thinking how Google is like the Old Testament God - sort of a "take it or leave it, them's the rules" being that is inscrutable, as in the Book of Job.   (On the other hand, I know, there are parts where God does grant the appeal, so to speak.  We're still waiting for Google to reach that level.)