Kashmir HillAfter I did the story about the dad whose Google account was closed and deleted for taking a photo of his naked toddler for the doctor, I heard from a distraught mother in Colorado who was going through the same thing and didn't know why. Her Google account was disabled, taking with it her wedding photos, videos of her 9yo son growing up, tax documents, email and everything else. And she had no idea why. She was in tears. "It feels like my house burned down," she told me: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/30/technology/google-appeals-change.html
The mother used a form to request a review of Google's decision to close her account, but to no avail. She was told only that there was harmful content in her YouTube account that might be illegal. She had no idea what it could be. This went on for weeks. And then her nine-year-old son finally confessed: He had used her old smartphone to make a YouTube short of himself dancing naked. He thought it would be funny. The YouTube app was signed into her account. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/30/technology/google-appeals-change.html
When I told Google this month about the mother's account being closed because of her son's ill-thought-out prank, the company decided to reinstate her account. I called her and asked her whether she'd gotten the news. No. She hadn't. She got emotional. She logged in and it worked. It had been reinstated 10 days earlier. "It's here. It's all here," she said. "I can't believe you did this. I have goosebumps." https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/30/technology/google-appeals-change.html
I can't do tech support for every parent whose Google account gets shut down over innocent depictions of their naked children, so I'm happy to report that Google said that it's changing its appeals process for users who have sexually explicit material featuring a minor in their accounts, allowing them to provide more context and documentation (such as a conversation with a doctor re: a picture taken for a medical diagnosis): https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/30/technology/google-appeals-change.html
Google will also start being more transparent about why an account has been disabled: https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/how-we-detect-remove-and-report-child-sexual-abuse-material/
Erin Jones@kashhill Did the father ever get his account back?
@erin no it had already been deleted by the time he came to me. He didn’t fully understand why it had been closed until he got a mailing from the SF police department nearly a year later revealing it had gotten a warrant for suspected child pornography in his account. He did get some of his Google data (6 months worth) from the sympathetic police who had a thumb drive from Google and had determined no crime was committed
@kashhill Thank You for the update. This is exactly the sort of thing that terrifies me with so much of my life in google.
0x726f63636f@kashhill it's good to read that they're finally going to improve these policies. I read that article when it came out, and it was the drop that convinced me to de-google and diversify most of my digital life (shortly after, I moved out of google drive, google photos and gmail, though the account is still active for a few harder-to-replace features where moving off google had diminishing returns).
For the record, my current stack is:
- protonmail (paid) with different aliases for media sites, ecommerce, services and friends to defeat account-matching advertising targeting techniques;
- onedrive (paid as part of an office subscription) for smartphone photo backups;
- dropbox (paid) for dslr backups and most documents;
- s3 (I'd say paid, but for the space I use, it's practically free) for more important documents.
The "paid" part is key, since it makes me a client, rather than the product.
Anthrodiva@kashhill so they will ostensibly supply ANY customer support? Color me dubious.
Nobody@kashhill Semi-quick fix for this: use Google Takeout to extract all your photos, use another file syncing service like Mega or OneDrive for photos, delete Google Photos from your phone(s).
Google is evil. Use Google products as little as possible.
railmeat@kashhill I guess everyone learns the importance of off line backups more of less the same way. These are particularly harsh examples. I am glad the people you spoke to got their pictures back. Did they learn that you can't trust the cloud?
That Anonymous CowardAnd the best advice you can give her right now is back everything up locally.
NiceMicro@kashhill so... now big tech will just ask for the medical records of their customers' children... yeah, that sounds really really nice.
@kashhill
> Users have an opportunity to challenge Google’s action
But not in a meaningful way, apparently/obviously.
The issue got resolved because an actual human being (PR person likely, but still) looked into it. And that only happened bc you wrote about it.
You're right that you can't do tech support for others.
The issue is that G👀gle doesn't either, unless it's a PR issue.
An appeal is all about providing context, but that wasn't possible before? 🤔
It's naive to think ggl will change.