3 min read
Mark, a software engineer and currently a stay-at-home dad noticed that his toddler’s private part seems a little too swollen and is hurting him constantly, responding immediately Mark went forward and grabbed his Android smartphone to take a photo of the swollen area and sent it to the doctor so that the issue can be resolved quickly.
Now we know what you might be thinking, why take a photo when he could have taken his toddler to the hospital in the first place? Well, it was in the middle of the pandemic, and the hospital nurse suggested them send photos instead of coming into the hospital.
Once the photos were sent in, the doctors identified the problem, and suggested some medicines and the swelling soon came to an end. However, this whole episode only pushed Mark into another massive problem and that was the blockage of his Google account, which further led him to lose all contacts, emails and photos, and even got him into a police investigation.
What really happened was that the photos of Mark’s toddler inside his gallery got identified by Google as a child abuse image. Once Google identifies any image that relates to abuse, it takes immediate action and proceeds to block the account while also informing local police about the details of the account owner.
Once his account got blocked, Mark lost over decades of data, but being a software engineer himself, he understood that errors like these do occur and that he will soon get his data back. “I knew that these companies were watching and that privacy is not what we would hope it to be. But I haven’t done anything wrong.” Said Mark while talking about the incident.
Soon after the incident, Mark filled out a Google form, in which he requested Google and explained to them that it was only a video made for his son’s treatment, but the tech giant did not listen and have gone to keep his account blocked up until now. With Mark being an avid user of Google, almost all of his digital data such as emails, contact information and even photos of his son’s younger years cannot be retrieved back.
Apart from replying that it cannot reinstate the account, Google also went forward and said that it would offer no further explanation or assistance, therefore blocking him out of all his digital existence. Mark regarding the situation said that “the more eggs you have in one basket, the more likely the basket is to break.”
While Google is consistent with its cold shoulder towards Mark, the San Francisco Police Department is pretty cooperative, once the police investigation began, Mark explained the whole situation in detail and the police departments were quickly able to judge the situation and said that no crime had occurred.
Google’s child abuse image detector, is a great tool that aims at catching child abuse criminals, however, Google should develop its machine learning to a higher extent before it can be trusted to block people’s accounts or incidents like these will only continue to happen.
