Once you reach the scale and importance of these services, it shouldn’t be legal to lock people out like this.
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"
> If anything, having a mandated formal process for reinstating banned accounts will make the scanning more acceptable, which it shouldn't be.
We should fight first for a proper legal recourse, and once this happens, then we can also fight for no scanning.
It does not matter, because we don't have any fight left in us at all..
I'm more than prepared to just stop working for a few days or even a week or two.
I already actively boycott Chinese products where possible (I buy non Chinese if at all possible, even at significant higher prices), support the Georgian Legion with my own cash and have probably spent hundreds of hours on unpaid online activism this half year on top of what I do for my church (although in all fairness it still does more for me).
If enough people band together and just plain stop working, sooner or later politicians will have to listen.
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.
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.
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.
So how come this has never happened?
Google and Facebook have existed for decades, and so has CP, they didn't have automatic detection untill decently and yet none of their employees have ever been charged.