Google will blur explicit image results for all users, requires login to disable | Hacker News Reader

Google will blur explicit image results for all users, requires login to disable

arstechnica.com

128 pointsknaik94136 comments

This is nothing short of puritanistic surveillance state bullshit. It's censorship, and is not okay.

On by default is ok—encouraged, even. Login required? heck no.

(edit: ugh, what if this is just because they're avoiding cookies to store this? because of "privacy")

Yes, and simply logging does nothing to prove your age. Nothing stops a teenager from creating an account with a fake age. So then the next step "to protect the children" will be requiring logging in with an account verified by a government issued photo ID so they can track you much more effectively. That seems like where we're heading with this crap.

They might use your Google Pay to see if you have a credit card attached and use that to confirm you are over 18. This is one of the age verification methods YT does.

They could if they cared about actually verifying age. But they don’t.

In fact, I would guess that Google can predict your age with good accuracy without you logging in.

I’ve had kids under 13 create Google accounts that said they were 75 or whatever. Google doesn’t care. They just want you logged in and selling “targeted” ads.

I expect there will eventually be some sort of smoking class action suit that gets damages from emails knowing that accounts are 5 years old and not stopping it because of revenue. Of course I’ve been waiting a long time.

> In fact, I would guess that Google can predict your age with good accuracy without you logging in.

My Google account is almost 20 years old at this point, and they still ask me for credit card verification every time I want to see an "age-restricted" video in YT (and "age-restricted" topics apparently includes Verilog programming).

Google can't predict anything.

They know your age. They just want your creditcard and a confirmation that it exactly you ( else they need to trigger the profiling algorithm for a new person).

You may not have come across this yourself, but Google requries verified ID to watch age-restricted videos on Youtube in EU, EAA, Switzerland or UK. It just hasn't hit US in the same way. Louisiana set a dangerous precedent though, legally.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/10070779?hl=en-GB#...

https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/10071085?visit_id...

Yep. This is about discovering what kind of n00dz you like.

Thankfully, there's alternatives to google image search, like Brave or DuckDuckGo which at least pay lip service to the idea that you're not tracked. (Who knows if they actually do avoid gathering and selling your data?)

Meanwhile, ChatAI tech is coming for Google's bread and butter, but Google can't think of anything else to do but increase its role in creating a corporate authoritarian dystopia. Of course, ChatAI has the potential to be far worse than anything Google has been up to, but that will be little consolation to Google if they dwindle down to being the next Yahoo.

Are you talking about the same ChatAI that will go in a loop as soon as you deviate slightly from a “clean” conversation? Google cleaned up their SERPs terribly over the the last few years but still returns some results for any query.

> still returns some results for any query.

On the contrary, Google's search has degraded severely. They now routinely tell me nothing was found when I'm searching for things I know exist, and know used to be indexed. Google is now third or fourth on my list of search engines because of this. They just aren't very good anymore.

That’s why I said. Still not good but at least it won’t judge you by saying it’s “unethical” and “immoral”. Plenty of searches are still possible on Google but aren’t on ChatGPT, like “what are you doing stepbro”

As we’re all meant to be living in the metaverse inside our self driving cars purchased by crypto, I’d wait to see what’s going to happen before making grand proclamations on the latest vastly overhyped tech.

You can definitely store this kind of "user preference" in a cookie without having to ask for it, at least in GDPR.

It seems that we are entering a new wave of anti-smut. I wonder if it's cyclical

Oh FFS. Read the article. The image is blurred, but if you click through it's not.

So this basically just resorts image search for NSFL and NSFW images back to text links. Unless you log in to enable image links.

I did read the article, and I do think the we both understood the interaction impact similarly—yeah, you can click to unblur an image, but you can't change the global preference without the login.

Requiring a login to change a preference rather than something that could be stored in a very simple cookie deanonymizes you, and creates an extremely clean audit trail of your usage patterns. There's far more friction in making scores of google burner accounts than it is to rotate VPNs and Incognito windows, if you're so inclined to obfuscate your trail. That's bad.

"Requiring a login to change a preference rather than something that could be stored in a very simple cookie deanonymizes you,"

Of course. That's basically step 1 in every proposed plan to prevent minors from accessing porn on the internet. Step 2 is verify age and linking it to the account.

If there is no shame in using porn, and nobody cares, you have nothing to fear™.

Yeah. I'm reminded of the news article a decade or more ago about this guy who bought porn or something like that. The company didn't deliver IIRC, and instead tried to extort money from the purchasers by threatening to doxx their purchases. And this guy straight up took them to court to get his money back.

So you make one burner account that you only ever log into from a VPN. Google gets slightly more relevant data, but it doesn't get linked to your main account.

Or you make a separate account for each one of your fetishes or NSFL investigatory journalism. Hopefully that isn't scores of accounts.

> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The "Read the article" was used primarily as an emphatic for the following sentences, not a literal.

The part of the article that highlights this particular point is also easy to miss (one very short sentence immediately beneath an image). And not all of us fully and thoroughly read articles (as indicated by my user name).

I've been seeing this happen on YouTube more and more where they identify a video as being explicit and that I must login with a Google account. Not having a Google account means I can't view the video - even youtube-dl can't download it. There are other workarounds like viewing it on my phone via NewPipe or installing FreeTube on desktop.

fyi, yt-dlp has some workarounds for this that youtube-dl doesn't.

youtube-dl is more or less unmaintained these days (last proper release: december 2021), yt-dlp is the main fork. lots of development happened here in the last few years.

Even when logged in there are still videos I can't watch on YouTube. I don't have a credit card, only debit, and I'm not sending Google pictures of my ID.

I agree. I hate this. Stop protecting users from themselves. Yeah, it's easily bypassed, but why the change? If someone is going to look for porn, they will find it anyway. What changed to make google resort to such drastic measures? Who or what politician forced Google's hand.

Not to mention, creating a Google account still requires a phone in many cases. So you have to give up your privacy, your phone number. I cannot wait until AI makes Google search at least a little less relevant.

> Not to mention, creating a Google account still requires a phone in many cases.

Not just creating a Google account; logging into a pre-existing Google account can require you to add a verified phone number. I had that happen to a relative (who does not even have a phone): when trying to login to their account, Google required a second factor to prove that the account was still theirs, and having access to the recovery email was not enough, the only thing it accepted was a SMS verification (which made zero sense, since there's no way Google could know whether that phone number was actually theirs).

It actually does make some sense--the black hat isn't going to want to give their phone number, and if they're beyond the reach of US law they're very unlikely to have a US phone number available.

> they're very unlikely to have a US phone number available.

...guess what, we don't have any US phone number available either! We only have Brazilian phone numbers, and Google did accept the Brazilian phone number I tried (which was not theirs, since like I said, they don't have a phone in the first place).

What was the old rallying call? It's their platform they can moderate their content at their pleasure. "When companies do it, it's not censorship" ...etc...

The 1st Amendment does not cover the private actions of companies.

Of course... that doesn't change that on both sides, it will be used. "This violates the first amendment, they are censoring misinformation!" "This violates the first amendment, they are censoring n00dz!" "The first amendment doesn't require them to put up with misinformation!" "The first amendment doesn't require them to censor n00dz!" And so on...

However, I will say, right now, that I find it interesting that the Hacker News hivemind in general is more sympathetic to the censorship of misinformation, than it is to the censorship of certain images. In which case, is it just a values judgement?

> The 1st Amendment does not cover the private actions of companies

This is exactly the statement the comment you replied to is criticizing. It keeps getting repeated in the wrong places, like here in this comment thread.

There's free speech, U.S. Constitution amendment 1, and there's free speech as an idea. I'd wager when people complain about lack of free speech, they are more concerned about the idea rather than the amendment. I think most people here know that amendment 1 relates only to the government, so it's unhelpful and unrelated to even bring up the first amendment.

Edit: of course, you're right that anyone complaining about lack of amendment 1 in this situation doesn't make sense, but note that's not the same as people complaining about a lack of free speech.

The 1st amendment was written at a very specific time back when the governments were the biggest oppressors, and the megacorporations of modern kind didn't exist; so it has protections against historically well-known and well-understood state censorship but not against not yet existing corporate censorship.

It's part of what's more-or-less the design document for the federal government. So of course it doesn't talk about behavior of non-government entities. Not because that's not important, but because it's off-topic and out of scope.

The government is the ultimate monopoly, you have no alternatives to it.

Some things have changed but that hasn't.

Instead of the first amendment being somehow applied to private actors (really dicey because doing that would violate _their_ first amendment rights!) perhaps what you should want instead is the re-fanging of antitrust?

Indeed the problems is people want freedom of speech for the speech they agree with. So, in this case, images. But because they disagree with anti-lockdowners or anti-vaxxers or whatever --they don't agree with those argument for free speech.

First amendment doesn’t cover obscenity. And it applies to private companies when they operate functions traditionally performed by the government.

I see nothing in the First about obscenity. That's just one of the things the puritans have managed to get away with circumventing the Constitution. It's also a pretty meaningless term.

This is no different than treason, hiring a hitman, fraud or libel. The founders did not consider any of those to be free speech as well. Everybody at the time understood obscenity was not protected so there was no need to explicitly call it out as an exception.

The legal concept regarding freedom of speech as in the First Amendment only applies to governments, yes.

But the moral ideal of freedom of speech is for everyone, and individuals and organizations can support and espouse it or censor and suppress it.

We need a concept to distinguish these, like "free as in legal" versus "free as in voice".

As for the argument that freedom of speech doesn't apply to misinformation or danger or obscenity or whatever -- that just creates an arms race to declare everything you don't like as misinformation or dangerous or obscenity. You combat such things in the open market of ideas and exchange, not by censorship. That's just might-makes-right.

dont confuse basic capitalism with some other random agenda. The point of this is to ensure they collect the fertile data of the adult porn industry.

Yes. Emphasis state. Recently passed AADC legislation (Age Appropriate Design Code for the UK) and CA-AADC (same thing, California) are going to make these kinds of design patterns common.

> puritanistic surveillance state bullshit

Probably. Also consider how much the porn industry is willing to pay to serve interested users ads. Incognito probably represents a substantial loss of revenue for Google.

I don't want my account to be tied with my adult entertainment search history. This is the underlying issue that deeply concerns me. Companies are allowed to make whatever stance they want on how they handle mature content.

But this forces people to stay logged in. Theoretically the two options are either use another service or make a burner Google account just for porn. I know Bing has a habit of making moderation policies similar to Google about things like this. Bing is better for porn and unfiltered results, but it has been becoming worse in the last few years. It's similar to how reverse image search with Bing was even more amazing than Google, but now they're equally terrible because they're doing the same kind of filtering on the backend.

Having to make an account means that account information can be used to track users across the internet. With incognito, at least it was basically a "new" account every time.

Edit: It's possible that this is related to the new Louisiana law requiring people use a digital driver's id wallet app to verify their age in order to use Pornhub.

Discussed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34260167

https://mashable.com/article/pornhub-louisiana-id

Is Google Image Search really a significant component in many people's adult entertainment process? If so, gosh, that's like a step up from using Wikipedia, but not a very big step.

Yes it is, I think it's unfair to dismiss literally the biggest search platform in the world. The image search tab isn't the destination, it can be, but it's also easy to find video thumbnails that take you to somewhere you can watch things or download things.

It's also a very powerful search tool for Tumblr blogs. I enjoy reading stories as well and so Google Search as a whole plays a big part. I have found alternatives, but there's a reason Google stays at the top despite these kinds of decisions. This kind of move makes me wonder when text results will also become locked down. It's now a question of when, not if.

I don't agree with any censorship, but in this case I find the idea of text censorship especially scary. It's a short trip to google not letting you see "misinformation" without being logged in

I agree and while search results are censored already because of DMCA or to remove personal info, it feels really different when the reasoning becomes moral judgement. I understand the goal and I can even believe that is being done with good intent, but it feels like there's a shift in how proactive Google will be in hiding explicit or sensitive results.

Does something like evidence of police brutality count as explicit content? This policy isn't targetting just NSFW content but also NSFL content, like video released of the savage killing of Tyre Nichols by Memphis police and the SCORPION unit. Those videos are extremely disturbing and would easily have been at home on a place like LiveLeak.

If someone searches police brutality without being logged in, will links to the real video be blurred/hidden?

I have a feeling this was a response to the Louisiana ruling on porn and the continued fight by current President Biden to weaken Sec 230. This would make sense if it was in response to a new definition of companies acting in good faith to remove illegal content. There hasn't been anything explicit about Sec 230, a critical court hearing is happening later this month. I hope this isn't a signal that the weakening of Sec 230 is likely going to happen. This kind of censorship will be a direct consequence if it does, and this'll only be the beginning.

https://www.axios.com/2023/02/07/tech-firms-section-230-supr...

This was my immediate response as well. My explicit content consumption is effectively nonexistent (an entirely neutral statement; I don't judge anyone else's, and it's just where I am in life), but it would not even occur to me to use Google for the purpose of consuming, rather than finding, this content. And I would probably stick to relatively trustworthy resources in the first place rather than wading into whatever malware-soaked options the ol' G Spot would suggest.

If other people's experiences are different, I mean, that's totally cool.

On the more general topic, I think I like the idea of being able to do an image search at work (where I cannot login to Google) without having an accidental goatse show up unmasked. But I also don't like private companies making editorial decisions on my behalf, so I'm torn.

I think there's a disconnect about why image search is useful. Google image search will link directly to websites that illegally post paid content using Keep2share links. Thumbnails from places like pornhub also show up in the results.

It's also really useful if you care to consume curated content via Tumblr. Tumblr's search is hot garbage, maybe intentionally, when it comes to searching for adult topic blogs. Tumblr reblogs link back to the original poster as well as everyone who also interacted with it by liking or reblogging. Crawling and mapping those relationships is the core of search algorithms.

And you won't accidentally get goatse to show up. Content is already filtered, you currently have to opt in to adult content. Safe search already defaults to strict, I don't believe you can directly change that even if you wanted to. There's been tons of complaints of people who toggle safesearch off but it makes no difference in results until you log in. If you are intentional about finding it, I am sure it will pop up. It's a toggle/warning sign not a cop.

I don't expect the audience of hacker news to fall for the kind of malware you're describing. And Google is still responsible for filtering out links to literal malware, regardless of context.

I appreciate that response. I was just sitting here wondering if this was at least partly motivated by (a) specific legal requirements in more restrictive jurisdictions and (b) anticipating anti-Big-Tech attacks from populist elements of political parties over the next few years.

But! (hehe) I have absolutely been accidentally goatse'd or nippled or whatever even with SafeSearch. I have no idea if a SafeSearch that missed an explicit image would be smart enough to blur the image in question, so back to square zero.

I just took a risk and Google image searched "goatse" and, while I can't recommend it, I didn't get the real picture even after I scrolled down a little. I got memes of sfw, maybe a little edgy, like one meme had a cup of peanut butter handle at an angle that could pass for the real thing at a glance, but it's filtered. And I am logged in with safe search completely disabled. It's basically the same results I get in an incognite window. SafeSearch filters are going to be even more aggressive now, you don't have to worry.

I have a feeling it's pre-emptive to avoid further regulation. The EU, most recently France, has been pushing really hard or already implemented a "porn passport" system where your ability to see mature content requires id. I just came across news that Louisiana has a new law as of a couple weeks ago that requires users verify their age using a digital drivers id app. That app is managed by a private company, not the government directly. I can't imagine a search engine like Google would intentionally make its own search worse. Adult content is huge in terms of traffic generated.

https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/03/you-must-now-verify-your-d...

I think Google purged itself of goatse picks. A plus for not showing gross stuff, but a negative for removing an early internet meme.

It’s funny that derived memes still exist even though the original is unavailable.

Advanced search still lets you force minimum resolution, unlike say bing which just has large/medium/small. Helpful if looking for something very specific in 15MP

> make a burner Google account just for porn.

Google is very likely able to connect your burner account back to your real identity. Even if you've got it in a firefox container, they can see two accounts coming from the same IP and browser fingerprint, and can probably score it as to how likely it is two different humans in the same household switching accounts vs. having a burner.

That still doesn't feel as concerning as having an identity tied to the content you consume. That kind of opsec analysis feels more theoretical than practical.

I might be naive but I imagine companies don't spend the energy needed to deanonymize someone just to be able to tie their burner porn account to them. How quickly the burner will get associated will depend on opsec. I think it's even less likely for that process to happen for every single time someone uses incognito mode or containers to enjoy adult content.

I know VPNs are enough to critically weaken whatever metric used to tie accounts together because I get so many Captchas. Unfortunately, making a burner Google account seems like the only option you have. Not using Google is technically an option but it's not a practical one.

Google search has been going the way of Yahoo, Alta Vista, Excite, Hotbot... for a while. More junk results, more paid junk content, more work flow breaking changes, can't copy, copy a url returns a google nightmare soup url, etc...less and less customer friendly every day. It's time for a new king.

Been mostly using DDG but excited to start fooling around with the new Bing.

If you told 2013 me I would be binging in 2023 I would have not believed you.

Yeah, outside of just habit, I am not entirely sure why someone would still be sticking to Google. I am using Brave Search, and its results are just as good as Google's. I am planning on running my own searx instance at some point to run it all myself before long

Won't the new Bing be used by DDG? I thought DDG was on top of Bing already.

They use the bing index at least

Whack-a-mole. The SEO-bots will be after Bing and ChatGPT soon enough.

It's not just SEO and bots. It's deliberate choice in how they develop the application and what features they are adding. Every feature they have added in the last few years has been user hostile.

Bought a Kagi sub in January after hearing about it on HN for a few months and I've been loving it.

Was content DDG user for the past few years just to slip the Google leash, but the Kagi results are A+; definitely prefer to DDG.

Edit: Though ofc for Kagi, one needs to be logged in for all searches, not just NSFW image searches. :)

I'll take a look. Thanks.

I'm surprised at the cataclysmic response here. I do hate puritanical stuff, but this doesn't seem that bad. I do worry that eventually they'll force people to log in to even see this content eventually, and that'll just be a sad day for the Internet. But just blurring it seems... ok? For me it's a far better setting than "On" even though I'd greatly prefer "Off".

Well, I guess it would be annoying if you were browsing only explicit images, like porn. But, at the risk of sounding crazy, I figured people had moved onto topic-specific sites for that kind of thing.

When people are browsing explicit images, whether medical or pornographic is often when they most want to be anonymous online.

Interesting how so many people can do it, and yet there's still a very strong stigma. You'll find more people saying they are LGBTQ+ than proud porn users.

The term you're looking for is sex positive and plenty of people self-identify that way.

I don't mind them blurring it. Its not really a problem. Heaven knows how many kids ended up with a porn addiction because Google displayed something that lead them down a rabbit hole. If that sort of addiction can be lessened by blurring images so they don't see them right away, I view it as a good thing. Of course, all the kid has to do is click on it then unblur it so its effectiveness is in question. Not to mention it does nothing to reduce the other routes porn addiction can be introduced.

However, despite all that, I DO have a problem with them requiring a login to disable the feature. It feels like a grab for more data. A way to get people to log in and let them attribute NSFW searches to an account. Google wants to know pretty much every part of you so they can sell you things...that includes adult services and objects. If they can nail what your fetish is, they can advertise to you stuff related to it.

Porn addiction?? Basically a made-up issues by the puritans.

I disagree. There is a lot of evidence that pornography causes real harm to both men and women. It can cause relationship problems, erectile disfunction, and can increase feelings of depression. I can provide official sources for this. While addiction is a very specific term and "porn addiction" technically doesn't exist if you want to be pedantic, I know many many people who want to give it up but struggle with doing that.

Here are the sources I got my information from. I sincerely hope that you read them. Being against porn does not necessarily mean being puritanical, as it has legitimate health risks that are legitimately concerning:

https://www.ansa.it/web/notizie/rubriche/english/2011/02/24/...

https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/brain-activity-in-sex-ad...

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-012-0164-0?

I wouldn't call it pedantic. Addiction is just the wrong word, because health issues related to habitual porn usage is not always a kind of addiction, and what most people seem to think constitutes addiction is completely off. No doubt there are health issues that can happen with habitual porn use, but that's mostly not even specific to porn.

A much bigger issue is the misunderstanding that people seem to have with what constitutes an addiction. Having a routine is not an addiction. Having hobbies, even if they are crude or not socially acceptable, is not an addiction. If it's not really negatively impacting your life and it's under control, you are fine.

I have a feeling depending on what circles you are adjacent to will impact your opinions on which misconception is worse, but there has got to be roughly no people who truly believe you couldn't have an unhealthy obsession with porn. That's ridiculous.

Your second link doesn't even address porn addiction at all.

And I think your third has the cart before the horse--porn use is a symptom of relationship problems far more than it is a cause of them.

It’s not the blurring, it’s the logging in. I don’t want to log into Google.

They could have had a setting, but this way makes them more money.

They already default to “safe search” or whatever. Making people log in does nothing to protect children and just lets them gather more data.

They’ve been doing this on YouTube for years with nsfw stuff.

Will users be able to click through to the original website instead of logging in?

Yes, users can click through to the original website. They'll just be clicking through on a blurred image.

This point is made in a single, short sentence of the original article that is easy to miss: "If you click "View image," you see life's frail nature."

It reminds me of how they do it on Mastodon.

Yeah--I have no problem with the existence of Safe Search. It's a good idea for the internet naive who can innocently get some shocking material. However, it should be under more user control. Hey, Google Translate, please interpret this in it's sexual sense, not it's innocent sense! I haven't figured out any way to do this. (I wanted it to translate the dirty word for penis--and I never figured out how to do it. It will translate dirty words if it doesn't have a choice.) And it shouldn't require logging in!

Google Translate generally seems to fare badly if you want to fine-tweak the translation or explore alternative meanings and things like that – at most it seems to usually offer a single alternative translation per sentence, and that's that.

If your language pair is supported by deepl.com, give that one a try – it offers alternative translations at a much more fine-grained level, down to individual words, and usually offers much more than just one single alternative.

Collecting personally identifiable logs of all the people browsing explicit images. What could go wrong.

Historically, pornography always fell under US law as obscenity, meaning that it was actually not protected by the First Amendment. The Miller Test for obscenity, arguably, still considers pornography to be obscene and therefore not legally protected, but is unenforceable because of how widespread pornography is and how widely accepted it has become.

From a legal perspective, I think the case for requiring age verification, or actually even banning or criminalizing pornographic distribution or use, is very strong from previous case law - and it would only take a SCOTUS ruling to bring it back. We can argue about whether that is good or bad for society - but, legally speaking, the US seems to be in the clear to control pornography (or, criminalize it) however it likes. The First Amendment is not an obstruction.

The last sentence of the article makes me wonder if this is more Google making a data grab, or more Google trying to get out in front of government requirements (see, we can self regulate, no need for additional regulations).

> "Google turned on SafeSearch as its default for under-18 users in August 2021, having been pressured by Congress to better protect children across its services, including search and YouTube."

Yeah, I think this is trying to head off government stupidity. Governments tend to have little concept of what is feasible and don't care if their puritan crusade has privacy holes you can drive a 747 through.

In most situations the setting is already on. Right now, the experience when you're not logged in, is that it takes some very aggressive search for pictures to even show up. It's already very conservative, and hides things that fall in a gray area. Suggestive pictures are filtered and gated, even content that would just barely be pg 13.

There are certain phrases or words that should produce explicit images but don't. And, from my experience, you have to append a sexually explicit word at the end for relevant images/results to show up. I have been noticing it more with Adult film actors' names.

There absolutely should be filtering and Google has gotten better are figuring out the gray area pictures. But it's not perfect at drawing that line.

And the other issue with this policy is that these searches get tied to your account. It's not a matter of being annoying. The filter being unintentionally off was never an option.

Yandex completely destroys Google in image search and especially reverse image search anyway.

Even though using it feels almost exactly like Google Image Search was 10+ years ago, it's just that product is way better than today's Google Image Search.

It seems like this will widen the gap with Bing, which is already superior for adult content.

Does everyone know that Bing is the place to go for those types of images or videos? Honestly this is getting to the point where my most used search engines are DDG and Bing. What a thing to say.

Bing also censors explicit results by default but you can change the setting with a cookie

Most actual adult sites also blur themselves if not keep you out until you set a cookie too, and frankly this is much more appropriate. I don't want to be at work, looking for a picture of, say, a banana, and inadvertently getting... "creative" pictures.

Remember, everything is a dildo if you're brave enough.

I really wish it would become part of the browser standards. It shouldn't be tied to an account, but to the machine and easily switchable (and, ideally, auto-switch based on the network you are connected to.) No possible shoulder surfers, send whatever. Same machine, office network, I want Safe Search on.

> Google turned on SafeSearch as its default for under-18 users in August 2021, having been pressured by Congress to better protect children across its services, including search and YouTube.

This is basically an end around the First Amendment. While the government is not allowed to ban speech, so it pressures corporations to ban speech on its behalf, with an implied threat they will will hurt the corporation in some way if it does not comply.

>so it pressures corporations to ban speech on its behalf, with an implied threat they will will hurt the corporation in some way if it does not comply.

Which is not actually legal. It's been found repeatedly in court that the government can't work hand in glove with a third party to violate civil rights. Otherwise the FBI would work hand in glove with third parties to beat people with rubber hoses until they confess.

> Which is not actually legal.

Perhaps so, but the legality of an action is immaterial if it is left unprosecuted.

But showing adult content to minors is illegal already. If a minor tries to buy that content in a store, the store owner would be violating the by selling it. Why is the internet different? It's also illegal for an adult to give that material to a minor, even if a minor asked for it. Because Google is a corporation, are they not required to obey the law?

A law already existing doesn't make something okay.

Note that Safe Search would exclude any visuals that would get a movie an R rating--but it's legal for parents to allow their children to see R rated movies. (And note that there's a grey area where there's stuff that's NC-17 but really contains nothing farther than an R, but either more of it or homosexual rather than heterosexual.)

And I recently ran into a tidbit about the rules in Australia: Detailed pictures of female genitalia are automatically 18+, even if the purpose is educational in showing girls the range of normal genitalia to show them that theirs is normal.

> or homosexual rather than heterosexual.

Do you have a source or more information on this? I'm sure it was implicit due to social norms in decades past but I couldn't find anything recent about this online.

I suggest watching "This Movie is Not Yet Rated".

Any tips on how to divorce yourself from google? I've got too many eggs in their basket.

Are you just wanting to de-google or take control of your data in general?

Search: SearXNG [public instance/self-hosted], startpage.com, etc.

GMail: Proton Mail, Tutanota

Calendar/Contacts/Docs/Drive/Meet/Photos: Nextcloud [self-hosted]

Android: Google Pixel with GrapheneOS

Maps: OSM, OSMAND+ for mobile GPS

The proton family of tools is pretty good: https://proton.me/

Apple, with their recent end-to-end encryption for iCloud ("Advanced Protection") is also an option.

For search the primary alternative, apart from Bing, would be DuckDuckGo obviously.

I mostly degoogled about 6 years ago. Focus on what you use the most, and would least like them to take away and find 1 acceptable alternative. Move that. Repeat.

Eventually you will be forced to accept either some losses(getting everything out of google docs), a long chore, or some google use.

With the passing of the Age Appropriate Design Code (AADC) in the UK and the California Age Appropriate Design Code expect to see this is a general design pattern across the internet.

https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio.... https://californiaaadc.com/

Some late night TV show (Jimmy Kimmel maybe?) used to have a recurring bit where they'd find an innocuous photo and then blur out parts of it in a way that suggested that the original was naughty.

I can't remember more so I couldn't find a link to any examples, but I can't wait for somebody to set up a Twitter account documenting Google's unintentionally funny false positive blurs.

Sounds like a “the man show” bit.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Show

I believe Kimmel's bit is "This Week in Unnecessary Censorship" where they bleeped and blurred various TV show segments.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJVjuJHqR7U [censored nsfw, obviously]

Yeah, that was it. Thank you!

I've always considered this video the canonical example of intentionally misleading censorship: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AXPnH0C9UA

The is reminiscent of "Mormon Bubbling" [1]. Click the image gallery link on that page for a whole lot of examples, some of which are quite convincing.

[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/mormon-porn-bubble-porn

I imagine this is in response to the recent Louisiana law that requires a website to verify a user's ID/Driver's license before showing any explicit content.

related discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34236632

Oh great. Another corporation which wants to know when I jerk off without at least a little bit of of effort to hide it.

Switch to Tin-Eye search.

That's not a solution, tin-eye is a reverse image search tool. This is affecting all image search results on google. I do use Tin-eye and have found it only useful for finding larger dimension relatively exact matches. It can handle crop and color filters but not much more.

Yandex reverse image search is currently the only useful reverse image search left that can do fuzzy matching. Like if I reverse image search a picture of a cathedral I took, it'll find other pictures of the same cathedral, even taken from different angles. Google and Bing used to be great, Google's is terrible when you include a human subject in the picture, and Bing is very very inconsistent. I have had times where I reverse image a picture and Bing finds nothing except ones a little bigger in dimension, but then I search using one of the bigger ones and it finds similar pictures like expected. It's literally the same picture, just cropped less, no color filters or watermarks.

You can use url's of images found on google/bing to further refine Tin-Eye search results.

On desktop most browsers have extensions that restore and augment the image search functionality. You can install one of them and not really have to worry about urls. From my knowledge, "find other sizes" is available on every reverse search service. I think Tin-Eye needs to update their interface a little, because it's better able to find the biggest image available online. But I have been running into a lot of dead links on when I search for something. I have to click like through 4 to 5 links before I find a working one, if I find a working one at all. I'm not sure how often they update their db.

> But I have been running into a lot of dead links on when I search for something.

It can still be interesting to know when an image was first seen, even if the link is now dead. Also sometimes a page only moved URLs or changed its site structure and the picture somehow didn't get indexed at the new location, so the dead URL still helps in tracking things down (rarely, but still). Sometimes you can find something on the Internet Archive.

Also in my experience Bing has a similar tendency of never letting go of things once it has indexed them, even when the result has been dead for quite a while. On the one hand this can be frustrating, but sometimes having just Bing's image preview is still better than nothing at all.

Is this a reference to (utterly spectacular) "Mistborn" series?

Clever, and when people complain they can just point to their democratically elected representatives with their ID demands ‘to protect the children’.

Hey remember when google's motto was 'do no evil?'

You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

When did technology take such a wrong turn?

I would have thought this was already the default behavior.

Does this mean they'll stop blocking those results?

What are some better image search sites?

DuckDuckGo image search has been working better than Google Images for me, for some time now.

Unironically Bing is significantly better than Google at image and video search.

It's geospatial where Google really shines.

> Bing is significantly better than Google at image [...] search

I'd say it depends. It certainly has its strengths, and I have definitively encountered (image) searches where Bing's results where noticeably superior to Google's, but one area where for me Google shines and Bing fails is the ability to search for "site:example.com keyword" and as long as the search keyword in question is recognised by Google's image recognition pipeline, it'll return search results not just based on the classic "index nearby text and hope it's somehow related to the pictures" method, but also based on the actual image contents themselves.

With Bing either they don't do that kind of image recognition at all, or maybe it just doesn't work as well in conjunction with the site:-operator, or maybe its image recognition simply has a much more limited vocabulary as compared to Google (at least for the things I'm interested in) – in any case that kind of search for me simply works much better with Google.

Yandex. There is nothing that comes close for reverse image searching by a mile. It even has the same feature as bing where you can just copy paste the picture itself, no need to mess with urls. Bing is decent but reverse image is failing the same way Google's is. And Bing recently introduced the obnoxious full screen UI where it gives you products it found in the picture instead of doing a real reverse image search.

Everyone uses bing for that anyway.

When you use Chrome you're always logged in, so it's not a big difference (for me). Let's see how Bing gets marketshare back.

Not in incognito

> When you use Chrome you're always logged in,

Only if you have an account and choose to log in with it..

> Only if you have an account and choose to log in with it..

Didn't Chrome automatically log you in to Google sites if you accessed them while logged in to Chrome?

It used to, they added a toggle switch for it after getting wind of some discontentment. It's still on by default, IIRC: https://www.howtogeek.com/fyi/how-to-stop-chrome-from-automa...

This is false on its face. You do not have to be logged in to anything to use Chrome.

I'm not.

Tracked but not logged in.

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