Google reports customer to police over doctor photos: this is why privacy matters

Here is an interview with Nick Merrill of Calyx Institute, who is creating CalyxOS as a means of moving people towards using de-googled android devices. It's actually pretty usable. https://youtu.be/4JQVl4V-GLs

The “why do you care if you don’t have anything to hide?” mentality is how we get awful privacy violations like The Patriot Act

The worst part is that those private pictures between the doctor and parent were actually looked at by other people BECAUSE of police investigation. By their actions, they turned it into what they claimed it was.

The irony is that they're the ones collecting pictures of your children more than any other entity.

Fun fact: when I was in school for a CS degree, a bunch of my friends in another class made a fun little application that tied into google hangouts to send encrypted messages back and forth. They used their regular google accounts because why would this be an issue. They got 90% on the project because in under two weeks they all got letters from google's legal department stating that unless they ceased development of this application and deleted all of the code their google accounts will be deleted and they will be blacklisted from ever having another google account. Professor took that as a job well done, but took 10% off for being detected.

We're even losing the right to repair our children

If everything you've ever said or done can be accessed, taken completely without context and used against you with zero accountability then absolutely everybody has a LOT to hide.

As a medical doctor, doctor Google has made my life hell trying to correct the misinformation and information out of context that Doctor Google has spread.

What I tell people to imagine is that these corporations are like a pervert or creep just walking behind you looking at everything you do. How would that make someone feel?

If you're not doing anything wrong, you definitively have something to fear. It's not paranoia when they're actively looking for something to accuse you of.

Earlier this year, I took a picture of my 1 yo kid taking a bubble bath. A few minutes later, I got an odd message from my carrier about 'an option to make certain photos private'. That means that photo was reviewed, flagged, and an action taken within minutes. This isn't OK.

Not charged with any crime, not admonished for the logical explanation, not guilty of any wrongdoing - and yet completely penalized. Something is severely wrong here. Its like the unethical and illegal 'civil asset forfeiture'. We need sanity today. Not more insanity.

I wonder if they investigated the doctor too for receiving such vile and abhorrent "sexual abuse materials"

The worst thing about this is that because of Google's mistake, this man and his child were stripped of their privacy and right to due process before Google put his digital life on death row.

I'm sure this is never abused against political or business rivals that use Google products.

The scariest part of all of this is that they probably used an ai to check the images, now if you know how AIs work then you know that they need training data to learn. For example, if you want to make an ai to recognize dogs you have images that contain dogs and images that don't, then you label those images (so a human would need to look at them and label it as a dog image or not) and then you train the ai with that. So Google practically collected millions of images of possible CP/rape and trained an AI on that.

The roofie analogy is on point. I shouldn't have to make sure that my rights are being violated.

This is terrifying. Imagine getting reported and registered as a predator, because an algorithm from some big tech company has decided, that something like this or maybe even family pictures from the beach are CP.

Here in Norway, half a year or so ago, a woman was in the media, because Google had closed her over a decade old account, where she had saved thousands upon thousands of pictures. Trying to figure out why was impossible. Finally it became clear, as the police contacted her, because they had been contacted by Google. She's an artist. Turned out a many year old picture of a mother best-feeding her child was reported for p-filia. So her account was closed and no explanation as to why. "Don't be evil"

"Why should we care if we don't have anything to hide?" I keep hearing that and what they people who say that don't realise is that when you live in a glass box it's possible for someone to miss what you said earlier and take it out of context