When Google plays judge and jury: account gone, zero due process
medium.com
medium.com
I turned to Academic Torrents, a platform widely used by researchers to share datasets. There, I downloaded a large NSFW dataset often cited in AI research. I unzipped the file in my Google Drive to begin preprocessing. A few days later, my entire Google account was banned — without warning, without explanation, and without any clear path to appeal.
I wasn’t browsing porn — I was benchmarking an on-device NSFW detection model. I never reviewed every file; my workflow was automated preprocessing. The only “mistake” was unzipping it in Google Drive, not realizing Google scans those files automatically and can flag them without context.
If Google truly cares about stopping harmful content, why not give researchers the exact file names so they can verify and have dataset maintainers remove it? That’s how you improve the data and prevent future issues — assuming it was a violation at all and not a false positive.
The real issue is that whether it’s for research, unintentional, or a false positive, there’s no fair process outside of Google to resolve it. Instead of an immediate, irreversible account ban, they could quarantine the suspected files while preserving access to the rest of the account. That would protect both children and innocent users.
Deliberately uploading gigabytes of NSFW data to Google Drive? What on earth did you think would happen?