They also conveniently forward to law enforcement parents who send non-sexual explicit images taken expressly for the purpose of examination by licensed medical personnel.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google-cs...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google-cs...
Whether the original ban was automated or not, one of their specialists must have been involved by now, not least because of the media coverage and the fact they reported it to the police. While the police declined to investigate further (from what we know, last time I read about this), there must be another reason for the account ban to remain in place.
I'm biased, I work at Google (I don't know anything about this that hasn't been reported), but I also just don't believe that a company would wilfully ban accounts that they don't have a good reason to ban, after human review. It would be a stupid move, especially considering the media attention. Hence my guess that there must be more to this story. Again I have no insider knowledge, this is purely personal speculation.
What can human contact add here? Excuses or reasoning for the content? Given the media attention, someone will almost certainly have reached out if there was any way that a reason or excuse could possibly change the outcome. If they didn't that implies again that there's more to this story.
I'm not going to pass any judgement on what the "more to the story" is here, I don't have all the facts, but it seems obvious to me that there are more facts, and that people are working from different amounts of information here.
I don’t think that there’s really any “hidden” context here that would convince many (except maybe those who get their paychecks from big G) that google is not in the wrong.
Perhaps the hidden context here is that they also investigated the couple after the journal report and found other “violations” which were ban worthy after, not before, their case was aired publicly. I don’t think many people would consider this theoretical scenario fair either.
No idea about this case, but there are grey areas and the cowardly position is the legally/socially safest one, regardless of what one local police department decided. It doesn't make Google right, but it is what it is.
Please do remember that this company you work for is somewhat notorious on this website for making "stupid moves" seemingly every other day with respect to basic product management. The usual defense is that some internal incentive mechanism blindly optimized for these stupid moves and no one is at the wheel to change the company's high-level behavior... is there really any reason to believe things are different here? Is there a mechanism by which someone helping a user get around a CSAM filter would get them promoted at Google, or would they just be taking on potentially-arbitrary levels of internal risk going off the rails on a side project wherein they have to condone something that has an air of danger to it with the only real goal of helping a user who probably wasn't even paying Google anything in the first place? I admittedly don't work at Google, but the impression one gets on the outside looking in is that doing something that wouldn't cause some major impact on your performance review "isn't very Googley" :(.
Police salivate over cases like this - until they decide to prosecute, it seems obvious that Google is in the wrong here.