If your photos are being scanned the system is compromised. Perhaps the author intended to produce a chilling effect necessary for people to understand this. There is no reason to believe your entire life on the Google platform is compromised and available (freely!) to any government agency that wants it.
Unfortunately, people won't realize how dangerous this is until a skin tone photo of something entirely benign gets marked as CSAM by a robot, and you wont know until the police are letting you know they want you in for questioning. What a dystopian world we live in.
Mixing up text and images isn't really pedantic. One is reading my thoughts, one is monitoring my captured moments. They're both bad, but very different. Even the author issued a correction at the top of the article, but should have updated the title to reflect the correction.
> However, it's not a far stretch (nor hard to imagine) this same technology is running on every Google-enabled service.
OK, but then write those articles, with proof. Until then, just keep journalism as accurate as possible. When we lower the bar so much that we're writing about things that we can imagine being true, it's just fantasy land.
> If your photos are being scanned the system is compromised.
I can have a Gmail account without having a Google Photos account, so no not everyone who sees the "Gmail will call the copy on you" headline has a reason to panic.
> Perhaps the author intended to produce a chilling effect necessary for people to understand this.
That's really irresponsible fear-mongering and I doubt was done by this author since they were responsible enough to post a correction at the top of the article. The truth is the scariest thing because it's real. Fantasy isn't scary because it's fiction.
> Correction: An earlier draft of this story misstated a technical detail; Mark didn’t email his photo to his doctor; rather, he took the photo with his phone and the image was automatically synched to his Google Photos account, triggering a scan.
A more accurate title is: Google will contact the police based on their analysis of your Google Photos.