A man takes a photo of his child’s groin for medical reasons and ends up labeled a pervert by Google
The Googleplex campus in Mountain View where Google made life-changing decisions against a man deemed innocent by law-enforcement
Two days after the photos were uploaded, Google shut down everything under the father’s name which included a Google Fi account. The Times report noted that Google called Mark on the phone to tell him that it considered the images of his son to be “harmful content” that was seen as “a severe violation of the company’s policies and might be illegal.” The father found out later that Google flagged a video on his phone and the San Francisco police started an investigation.
Gillmor adds, “And it’s not just that I don’t think that these systems can catch every case of child abuse, it’s that they have really terrible consequences in terms of false positives for people. People’s lives can be really upended by the machinery and the humans in the loop simply making a bad decision because they don’t have any reason to try to fix it.”
Adding some more background information to this story should make it more understandable. The events in this article took place in February 2021 when many doctor’s offices were still closed due to COVID. The photos that Mark took were requested by the doctor’s nurse. Google, for its part, says that it only scans images when a user takes “affirmative action” which in this case meant uploading the images to Google Photos.
Despite being cleared by law enforcement, Mark still cannot get reinstated by Google
It is important to note that Mark was cleared by the police of committing any crime. Google is required by federal law to report potential offenders to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) CyberTipLine. Last year, Google reported 621,583 cases to the tip line. Of those cases, 4,260 were passed on to authorities. Mark’s case was among them according to The Times.
Instead, Google took away Mark’s access to emails, photos, contacts, and his phone number. Frankly, it’s hard to defend Google for continuing its persecution of a man who has not only been found innocent by police but one who obviously cares deeply about his child.
