Google refuses to reinstate account after man took medical images of son’s groin

https://sweden.se/life/society/a-cashless-society

Where I am really not sure how to feel about it.

- https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/02/bill-ackman-blasts-visa-sayi... - https://thehill.com/policy/technology/548279-mastercard-upda...

Getting deplatform by payment processors is existential. Also, of note, they are just the front door to a banking system that is generally necessary for commerce and yet under similar pressure to police:

- https://www.marijuanamoment.net/marijuana-banking-reform-wil... - https://www.aba.com/advocacy/our-issues/cannabis

Perhaps nether is as salient as the news cycles devoted to SWIFT and the norming power that exclusion form it was sure to demonstrate.

- https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60521822

(Specific links are arbitrary pointers into the issues referenced)

Congress fed up with how corporation treats citizens? Some unions?

The only thing I could imagine is the other corporation. Not much more.

To organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful - Google

To enhance the lives of our people, members, customers, and the communities in which we trade - Co-op group

Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together - Facebook

To support national and international security policies that protect those who are defenseless and provide a free voice for all with a dedication to providing ethical, efficient, and effective turnkey solutions that positively impact the lives of those still caught in desperate times - Blackwater

I would argue all of the (along with the generic maximizing shareholders value obviously.) are concrete expressions of specific underlying ideologies. Roughly speaking these are that information should be universally accessible, corporations should benefit not just their shareholders, the world would be better if we were all one big family (very dubious!), and being a mercenary is fine as long as you're an "ethical" mercenary, whatever that means.

That we often don't see these as ideologically motivated statements is just because they are all, to a greater or lesser extent, in line with the dominant ideologies of our time, capitalism and liberal democracy.

So it is not a symbiosis per se but rather complete overtake of host (State).

State becoming irrelevant makes politics a reality show.

Voting with dollars works with corps so they are self correcting, in the sense of they want to keep their customer base. But what happens when someone is poor enough to not be their customer? Or they are rich enough to overlook discriminatory behavior of their employees?

In the end invisible hand of capitalism sorts out corporations. But OPs example of a ruined life is totally possible. Yes, state can be more powerful but by the time it reacts, it might be too late.

I totally disagree. Early EIC/VOC rule was lawless. Or rather, the EIC was literally sovereign. They ruled colonies in the same way that monarchies, democracies and whatnot rule. 17th century royal charters devolved power to these companies like they devolved power to colonial governorships or other bodies.

The early EIC is more comparable to the Colony of Virginia, which itself started as the Virginia Company. All technically ruled under a royal charter, but were practically sovereign within their domains.

Later EIC rule was more similar to modern corporate examples. Rule of Law was ostensibly introduced, and you could (in theory) take your grievances to civil authorities. In some ways, this starts to become similar to modern examples of corporatism. The EIC was still extremely big, rich and powerful. But in this later period, state power and state coffers interweaved

Later, British state rule.

Do you realize how ridiculous putting “number of people using for search” and all of “world trade” in the same comparison is? Google’s 200-300 billion annual revenue is barely 1% of the US GDP.

For a size comparison, you would need to throw all of the FAANGs together, some energy companies, and some banks to reach the inflation adjusted market cap of the Dutch East India trading company: https://dutchreview.com/culture/history/how-rich-was-the-dut...

Playing devil’s advocate, possession of CP is criminal with absolute liability [1]. Deleting someone’s account, far from it. (Civil. Maybe.)

Weighing someone who might have CP, even to an absurdly low probability, against them being suing and like two people deleting their Gmail accounts, I can see how someone chose the former. If they got the call wrong, Google would not only be liable for damages, the individuals involved could be criminally charged.

I’m assuming everyone in this chain would appreciate laws clarifying an email bill of rights. On the other hand, Google made their bed with its surveillance-first culture.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_liability

There is no good excuse for this kind of spying apparatus, period. If anything, having a mandated formal process for reinstating banned accounts will make the scanning more acceptable, which it shouldn't be. "You see, yes, we're regularly checking out your dick pics but it's all good, we have a process in place and if we tag an image as CP, when it's not, you'll eventually be exonerated. No harm done"

This can't keep going on like this. To somebody like Google, an account might just be a profit source, but to the affected people it can be their lives or livelihood.

The issue of right of redress really needs to be forced, legislatively.

This might go against some people's idea of a free market. I think it should only apply where there isn't a free market - when a customer doesn't have many other options, such as in the case of Google or Apple, or Visa/Mastercard, a major supermarket, or the choice of cellphone provider or Internet provider in markets where there are only a few options. It wouldn't apply to small independent traders by definition.

Capture enough of the market where there isn't enough competition and you get obligations to treat them fairly.

Google can use the defense that somewhere in the TOS it probably says you agree to share everything with them when it goes to cloud storage.

HIPAA doesn't prohibit people from sharing info about themselves (even accidentally). Though it does probibits your doctor from putting photos like this near Google anything.

In this case, they actually satisfy the two requirements:

1. "ongoing legitimate interest". They are still in a dispute with the customer. Deactivating an account does not require deleting data, so long as the case it not closed. There is no "30 day" limit in this case, and it seems like an arbitrary time period imposed by someone who hasn't thought of the consequences.

2. "users permission". In this case they do have the user permission to keep the content, because the user wants to keep access to the account.

> they don't have the capability to implement any other option.

As mentioned above, you can deactivate an account without also deleting it. It may of course be easier for Google to just delete it instead of introducing a new state, but I would argue that a company such as Google does have the capability to implement this option. I would go so far as to say this is a failure of Google to not have such a process in place.

It was however, trivial for her to make a new account.

The Apple thing was only attaching a hash code to each image and doing nothing else unless you uploaded it Apple’s servers.

Of course you would have to trust that the policy of only iCloud images would stay in place after they implemented a tool to scan everything on your phone, which seems like a terrible bet.

They are backups, you can make a new backup, unless your computer catchers fire at the same time as you get banned.

More like, have alternatives ready and know what to do to avoid downtime if your main supermarket randomly permabans you for accidentally losing a receipt between purchase and exit, or having unaccounted for bottle of coke in your backpack that you bought at another store, or just looking sus. Or yes maybe it's found to be poisoning food. Fairly reasonable to be prepared.

> Email is a utility and should be regulated like one.

I want less barriers to operating my own email if I want it, having to get a license and such is the opposite of the goal. Maybe that's not what you mean though.

Generally regulating anything is a tradeoff. It helps established monopolies and prevents competition.

I'd say it's very practical to not exchange medical information over an insecure channel. I don't email naked pictures of myself or even worse share pictures of a child's genitals in some google drive folder anyone can copy or share. my life is perfectly functional. Anyone who deals with email should treat any email they write like they're public, because there's always one dude who copies some entire chain into a reply or forwards something to a hundred random people that weren't supposed to get it.

When you mail something like this you don't even know if the doctor or the secretary opens them. If they're immediately backed up to some remote server now some tech worker has access to naked pictures of your kid. You can't request to delete that information, there's no ownership. That's a completely insane way to treat your most sensitive data.

For tele-medicine there's strict regulations on the safety of apps and how patient data are treated. Consult doctors through one of those. I'm not even sure if it's technically legal for a doctor to interact with patient data as described in the article.

It's ironic that you chose Standard Oil as an example. It was an unbeatable monopoly that was broken up by govt regulation, not by competition. You're arguing against your own position.

> Pay for an email service, and sue if you incur damages due to them terminating your service.

You always sign away this right when using a commercial email service. Their terms of use allow them to terminate your account with impunity.

> Or run your own email server if you care to.

This is a very 1990s understanding of the email ecosystem. It's almost impossible to start a new email service today because the big players (primarily Google and Microsoft) won't trust you and will silently refuse to deliver your emails. Sometimes you will be blanket banned, sometimes you'll just have a few missing here or there.

Because the email market is dominated by so few players, they have complete control over the ecosystem. Even if you choose your email service, your recipients will have chosen one of the big players 99.999% of the time, meaning you're also playing by their rules.

You realize that Standard Oil was broken up by the courts through the Sherman Act, which is precisely the type of regulatory action you're arguing against, right?

> Its history as one of the world's first and largest multinational corporations ended in 1911, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it was an illegal monopoly.

Seems like it was broken up by the government and not due to competition.

Only to find your mail blackholed by said behemoths because your counterparty uses them.

I hope I didn’t overstep some kind of bullshit law where I can’t take pictures for medical advice.. this is ridiculous, and I’m happy that I’m not pushing my pics automatically to google, I might have been banned? I still have the pics somewhere on my phone, probably, amongst others where he’s naked when he was messing with foam in the bath or playing in the garden with water in summer. Isn’t this like 90% of parents?!

I feel that this whole CSAM is a new obsession of phone actors because they feel there’s norhing else they can innovate on.