Irreal

I thought I was finished with the story of Google falsely accusing one of their users of child molestation but Ben Thompson of Stratechery has his own take on the matter that he describes in a long blog post on the controversy.

He’s ambivalent on the matter of whether or not Google should be scanning their users’ photos. He wonders if the harm that child pornography does to children justifies Google’s spying on people. He’s not sure. I am: nothing justifies the spying and the argument that child pornography does is too easily extended to other public safety issues and eventually to any reason at all.

Thompson is sure of one thing: Google should have restored the user’s account and files and he’s astounded that they haven’t. It’s hard to understand why not. Perhaps they’re afraid of admitting guilt in case there’s future legal action.

In every story like this the apologists always say that Google or whoever is, after all, a private company and they can do as they like as long as it’s not illegal. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and the other big players have worked hard to become essential utilities and they’ve largely succeeded. But if they want to be like the electric or telephone utilities then they should operate under the same sorts of rules. Yes, they are private companies but they have civic responsibilities. They shouldn’t be able, for example, to refuse service to someone because they don’t like what they say or do as long as it’s legal. It’s time to stop letting these companies have it both ways.

After I wrote yesterday’s post on Google falsely accusing an innocent man of child molestation, I saw this post on the story by John Gruber. My first thought was that I would fold whatever Gruber had to say into my post.

I noticed when reading the post, however, that there a couple of problems with it so I decided on a separate Irreal post. The first problem was annoying. Despite the fact that the user lost a decade’s worth of email, photos, his cellular plan, his email address, and other valuable assets, Gruber fails to draw the obvious conclusion: Don’t commit anything valuable to Google’s care. In fact, don’t use Google’s services at all if you don’t want to lose your data and run the risk of Google informing on you to the police. Your best bet is to tell Google to “lose your number”.

The second problem was infuriating. Gruber, while acknowledging that it was a terrible story and an injustice, excuses Google on the grounds of “good intentions”. You see that a lot whenever child pornography—or other viscerally disturbing subjects, or even more mundane reasons for spying on users—is discussed. “Yes, it’s terrible that innocent people got caught up in Google’s (or whomever’s) surveillance net but it’s okay because Google had good intentions.” The idea is that it’s okay to spy on users in the service of combating the scourge of child pornography.

It’s not. It’s saying, “We don’t have any reason to think you’ve done anything wrong but we’re going to spy on you just to make sure.” In an earlier time we used to call those people nosey parkers and shunned them. Or perhaps bloodied their noses or had them arrested. That’s extreme but there was a lot less gratuitous snooping into other people’s business.

What!? You’re stilling using Google services? Haven’t you been listening to anything I’ve told you? I’m sorry but I’m over being polite. If you’re still using Gmail, Google Docs, or Google Photos, then you’re being naively foolish and deserve whatever bad thing happens to you as a result.

Google, apparently not content with simply arbitrarily closing users’ accounts and seizing their data when one of their automating scanning tools finds something they disapprove of, have started reporting them to the police. Read this post from Cory Doctorow on how Google closed a user’s account and reported him to the police for child abuse and even after he was cleared of wrong doing refused to restore his data.

The TL;DR is that the user’s son had swollen genitals and when the parents consulted his doctor, the doctor asked them to take a picture of the boys genitals and send them to him because he wasn’t seeing patients in person due to COVID. Since the photo was automatically synced to Google Photos, it was scanned and Google, clutching their pearls, was sure a crime had been committed and notified the police giving them access to all of the user’s files.

The police soon realized that there was no crime or dubious behavior but Google is still refusing to admit they were wrong and won’t restore the data. Other than the loss of data—and other problems described in the post—you could, I guess, say the story had a happy ending but it’s not at all hard to imagine that it might not have.

If you deal with Google you’re putting yourself at risk of not just losing your data but of serious legal difficulties. Stop being stupid. There are plenty of good alternatives.