Mark noticed something amiss with his toddler. His son’s penis looked swollen and was hurting him. Mark, a stay-at-home dad in San Francisco, grabbed his Android smartphone and took photos to document the problem so he could track its progression.
It was a Friday night in February 2021. His wife called their health care provider to schedule an emergency consultation for the next morning, by video because it was a Saturday and there was a pandemic going on. A nurse said to send photos so the doctor could review them in advance.
Mark’s wife grabbed her husband’s phone and texted a few close-ups of their son’s groin area to her iPhone so she could upload them to the health care provider’s messaging system.
The episode cost Mark more than a decade of contacts, emails and photos, and made him the target of a police investigation. Mark, who asked to be identified only by his first name for fear of potential reputational harm, had been caught in an algorithmic net designed to snare people exchanging child sexual abuse material.
Because technology companies capture so much data, they have been pressured to examine what passes through their servers to detect and prevent criminal behavior. Child advocates say the companies’ cooperation is essential to combat the online spread of sexual abuse imagery. But it can entail peering into private archives that has cast innocent behavior in a sinister light in at least two cases The New York Times has unearthed.
The PHONE is just a government tracking device documenting your every move.
The first thing law enforcement goes for in a investigation is the suspects PHONE that’s why no matter what the situation is never talk to the cops always ask for a lawyer because if what you say don’t match the data they find in your phone, your azz is grass
So be careful, this poor guy during the pandemic almost gotta one way ticket strike to prison and a life time of punishment for doing what the doctor told him too.
Well looks like Google AI has ways to go in distinguishing what is CP and what is medical images. Also, Google has ways to go in refining their protocols in situations like this so legit customers like poor Mark doesn’t lose his important data and not get harassed by police.
Either way – this has been educational. This is why I store data elsewhere, so I don’t lose vital contact info when Google poops out on me.
Poor kid likely took the toilet seat drop. Ouch! Not the first young man to experience it either during potty training. They witness Dad putting the seat up to pee so naturally they mimic. I’d be curious about the logarithm used to” qualify” the photo for red flag. The words in the title are sus.
Are any of you “old enough” to remember when taking your film down to the drugstore carried the same risk? A 3rd party, the darkroom tech, got to make individual judgement calls about ALL your pictures. Dropbox, Google, Amazon, Apple, Yahoo, etc. run your pictures through a “fingerprinting algorithm” developed by Microsoft; before encrypting and storing your uploaded filse. NEVER allow pictures to be backed up to cloud storage. Use local (encrypted) backup media instead.
If these companies have so many blocks in place to stop the spread of on line imagery, than why is there ,by the police’s own admission , in fact a spread of online imagery. Seems like no one can satisfactorily control or eliminate it so they resort to attempting to bust anybody they deem worthy, like this poor innocent shmuck, in their feeble attempts to justify what amounts to a finger in the dyke.
Amazes me that we can find a man hiding in a cave over 10,000 miles away, but police can’t seem to find the few groups that have been proven to post the majority of actual illegal child imagery. The people viewing randomly or even those involved in trading or not the producers of this garbage. Go to the source and eliminate the threat. I see it as akin to any televised event. You might have millions viewing it ( and illegal porn does have that many viewers), but you only have a very few actually creating the event.
But then doing that that would solve the problem, and law enforcement doesn’t want to eliminate a problem, just regulate it for their own benefit. So they keep busting “offenders” while ignoring the real problem.
There are several US States that have have nude beaches. Mostly federal land. There’s also many nudist colonies around the US. Private lands. There’s also backyards enclosed by fences (fences have to meet certain heights and etc etc etc to be considered private fences… blah blah blah). Maybe a neighbor poked a cam over your fence and saw your kid running naked through the sprinkler?
It’s not far fetched that the US can and already does and have the capability to “see” anywhere on Earth from above. There’s also the millions, billions, quad quadruple hundreds of whatever-illions of public cameras.
Will ANY nudity be eventually criminalized? I read this dad and another similar charge were dropped and their Google accounts reopened… but at what cost?
Many parents snap a pic or video of their child naked… in a bath, jumping happily on a bed, looking for seashells on a beach, or just being.
It blows my mind that humans have become so protective of one being naked (insert the many Bible scriptures condoning nudity, and the history of mankind cloth-less).
It’s not that Google flagged, disabled, or reported the account, but that they were permanently gone and not made whole again that’s the problem!
‘We stand behind our decision’.
Yeah! Well, when and if it happens to YOU, I’ll bet the decisions get revised.
‘There was no wrong doing in the end and even the police and doctors said as much, BUT they’re suspect now and we can’t be seen soft on innocent people with sick children who were wrongly accused. We stand behind that.’
Google is a private company that can supposedly do what they want, but they should be taken to court for this and forced to explain themselves for all to see. Wouldn’t look too good for them. I know these articles are public, but being taken to court gets more attention.
Just venting. It’s just so wrong that even if you’re 100% innocent, you’re still punished.