https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
"Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."
Any tips? It’s been on my lowest priority todo list to migrate off of gmail for several years, and I think the biggest reason I haven’t yet is that I know nothing about alternatives. I haven’t had to think at all about email for 15-20 years or so, and I’d like to keep it that way as much as possible after any switch. How close does protonmail get to that ideal?
The key is not to forward your email from gmail and just start fresh. Slowly migrate all comms and eventually you’ll never look at that email again.
Good luck convincing them to admit their “appeal” system, and their media review, were mistakes. Google is too arrogant for that.
Perhaps there is more to the story than what the article lets on...perhaps not. We will never really know.
There’s no apparent customer service system so I suspect the whole process is informal to some extent.
My dog has crypto* and my vet asked me to send him pics at various states of arousal so I have numerous pics of dog junk on my phone.
* Cryptorchidism is the medical term that refers to the failure of one or both testicles (testes) to descend into the scrotum.
> Mark’s wife grabbed her husband’s phone and texted a few high-quality close-ups of their son’s groin area to her iPhone
> Gmail account ... Mark ... came to rely heavily on Google ... appointments ... on Google Calendar... smartphone camera backed up his photos ... to the Google cloud. ... Google Fi.
The photos should never have been made visible to third parties, certainly not large nosy corporations which analyze you and your behavior and "flag" people (and also share info with the NSA or other US government agencies, as per the Snowden revelations). We must educate people around us not to just use these gratis software services naively. Of course, the defaults of what's installed and configured on the gadgets we buy is something that many will stick with despite our best efforts - but remember that all of this would never have happened if Mark had not _actively_ allowed it: If he had simply never had a Google account, or never entered its credentials into his, phone, this whole situation would have been averted.
So, tell your friends, tell your family members, tell yourselves:
* Putting something "on the cloud" means giving a third party, whom you can't trust, a copy of it.
* When you send someone an email, it's like you've sent a copy to the company which runs his email service. If its @gmail.com - imagine your email is placed on large placards in Google's lobby.
* Minimize the use of services by large multi-pronged companies like Google, to avoid surveillance.
... and all of above for Apple, their iTunes cloud, email and other services. Finally,
* Prefer privacy-respecting communications applications like Signal for sending messages.
Usually photoDNA has been deployed for this, but that almost certainly wouldn't be triggered by the dad uploading his own photos that hadn't been previously marked as CSAM in the photoDNA database.
If I appeal, it usually gets overturned, but sometimes sneakers get confirmed as weapons after review. There seems to be no image history; when a previously whitelisted product gets imported again (with a minor change in description or something), it may get classified as weapon again.
Needless to say, my ad spend is now zero and I expect my account to get banned any moment.
Fuzzy AI-based image analysis is OK for things like extracting roof shapes from aerial images, but seems totally inadequate for moderation, because it lacks nuance and context.
Recontextualisation is one hell of a drug.
Wife and I take a lot of photos of our newborn, including in the bath. We think nothing of it, but probably worth figuring out a digital plan.
If the idea of an AI flagging an innocent moment wasn't bad enough, I can't stomach the idea of having to appeal this by literally having a stranger review a private moment in order to determine if it was sexual abuse. This just seems like an unjustifiable invasion of privacy.
As long as you use proprietary software on your devices you will never be safe from this type of thing.
To them, they have a phone that backs up to the cloud.
Babylon data breach for UK GPs:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23471347
Palantir getting its teeth into the NHS:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56183785
Next time I need a doctors appointment I’ll do my best to make it in-person.
Protecting children is important. AI is imperfect.
But there is no reason the keep the account suspended once it’s clear there was no wrongdoing.
This man is innocent of doing anything wrong. Google had suspended him, and removed access to all his online account data. And refuses to reinstate.
We balance out liberties with responsibilities all the time. We allow the state power to protect children, and corporations have the right to assist them.
There are careful balancing acts being done.
But there is no balancing act here. There is no justification for Googles action.
I've also come to love nextcloud, I started using it to replace google photos, but there are tons of other great features too. I use it for photos, notes, calendar, contacts, news, and some collaboration stuff. It's open source, you can self-host, or get a hosted account somewhere.
While you're degoogling, start using duckduckgo for search. It's a better experience than google these days, and if you really want to send a query over to google, just add !g to the end of the search.
Get off of Chrome too. I would prefer that you use firefox, but chromium works fine too.
Getting off of google voice took a bit more work. I ported my number to Telnyx, wrote a SMS-to-XMPP bridge, and set up Asterisk to route voice calls. I'm happy with that solution but it won't be practical for most, so maybe someone else can comment on google voice alternatives.
The rest of your comment seems fair, and equally very interesting, and I'll follow up with fastmail and nextcloud - thanks, but just the particular "I would prefer that you....", seemed jarringly out of place, and made me somewhat happier I use [a heavily customised] Brave [with a very edited hosts file], for no other good reason than ff just doesn't do it for me, as much as I've tried, and tried to like it.
Because I have the exact same kinds of photos on my phone, auto-backed up to Google Photos, intended for his physician.
His first mistake. He (and a whole bunch of others) forgot the principle of least privilege. The moment you start letting a company like google domesticate your usage patterns, you're essentially their bitch from that point onward. Better to keep all of their stuff compartmentalized
The time has long passed since we should have left Google services if we care at all about privacy.
If you have to use GCP, use a burner account… because Google is absolutely asinine right now.
I would not trust Google if they were a hired employee to turn on my sprinklers in the morning.
Edit: For this reason, I am actually all in favor of having GCP, AWS, Azure, etc declared utilities. Unless there is a crime, we have a right to an account. Your electricity company can’t cut you off whenever they feel like.
Does that actually help? Don't they collect enough of your data to be able to correlate accounts?
The way I see it, if you don't mind price, you go with AWS (most polished). If you mind price gcp isn't really much cheaper, so you go with something actually cheap like OCI.
Cynically, fairly typical vendor lock-in.
From a non-technologist perspective, is a linked Android device becomes neutered?
even if you were to run a domain name zonefile that pointed its MX at something non-google and had zero A records or CNAMEs pointing at things hosted on GCP, you'd still risk being unable to login or admin your domain.
It wouldn't take much for Google to turn this around, that's the really screwed up part. All the would have to do to regain trust is come out and admit their system did something wrong and provide recourse for resolution in these cases. Instead they just double down and hope people forget.
Google implied that the account was suspended because of real CSAM concerns unrelated to the photos sent to the doctor/police officer (other photos in their account? they wouldn't go into details about their decision) and that the officer closing the case doesn't mean their judgement here is wrong.
If that's the case I can understand why they're obstinate about their decision (which otherwise would seem like a dumb mistake they should just reverse), but the problem is none of this happens in a place where users have any ability to get reinstated or have any sort of control over their digital life - there's no real path any individual has out of this even after going to the press. There's no due process, no way to defend yourself, no way to get them to show how they made their decision. As I understand it you have no rights beyond the ToS.
The user also losing all related account access (two factor, email, etc.) is particularly bad. This is also categorically different from Apple's approach which compared hashes of CSAM with what's in the NCMEC database which would not have caused this mistake (here Google is using computer vision to discover and flag novel images).
This is where legislation is required. Mass-scale social media/cloud providers/etc are effectively public utilities, and you should be able to challenge their decisions in court - the current situation is as bad as if the electricity company could disconnect you for non-specific reasons and you had no reasonable prospects of a successful legal challenge to their decision.
(Such regulation should be limited to providers above a certain size-maybe a cutoff like 10 million MAU or 500 million annual revenue-so small players aren’t burdened by it.)
They don't want to get into the business of deciding what is and isn't sexual imagery. Instead, it's easier to just ban people and forget about it.
It's the same type of behaviour and attitude that lead to damoore being fired. No room for ambiguity or nuance at Google. Everything can be decided by an algorithm.
It's one thing to debate the benefits that society gets for removing/flagging content, but the costs are immediately 10x higher when the false positives have zero recourse.
Even 'legitimate' cases often can't speak to a human to find out why or how they were flagged (unless they have influence). The public can't find out what motives/reasoning or who was behind certain content being removed. So it feeds into conspiracies and builds resentment.
I'd hope to see this covered under anti-trust laws (not a lawyer though, don't know the laws or their applicability). There's only one Google, and Google had quite the monopoly on being Google. They're big enough to be either regulated or broken up.
I still have no idea how, but my 2FA enabled Facebook account (with a unique and secure password) was compromised while I was sleeping. Shortly after, the attacker started using my Business Manager account to run ads for fake products on their scam stores.
Here's the catch: my personal Facebook account was permanently banned right away, but my Business Manager account wasn't.
How? According to other folks who had the same done to them around that time, the attackers would upload CSAM content on your timeline so that you get immediately banned/locked out.
Well, that means I could no longer retrieve/change my business manager account, which gave the attacker free reign to run ads for about a month. To some degree this means that Facebooks CSAM system gives the attackers a way to compromise Business Manager accounts more efficiently.
I submitted a ban appeal, but didn't hear back. I read online that if you have an Oculus, reaching out via their support is the only real option, so I did just that.
I wrote down a detailed account of the timeline of events, along with screenshots etc., and sent it to an Oculus support agent. In fact, they thanked me during the interaction or providing 'the most detailed' report they'd seen.
The evidence was pretty clear: at 5am or so, someone had logged in to my account via a foreign IP, change my email to a Chinese address and added a hardware 2FA key. The ads they were running to scam stores were often in Chinese, too. Not exactly a difficult case to crack.
They assured me I'd hear back within 7 days, but a month or so later I received an automated email from Facebook stating that the time for my appeal had expired, so the account would stay permanently banned.
That was mildly infuriating, given I never heard back from anyone.
What did losing my Facebook account mean to me?
As much as I'd been considering moving off social media, it briefly ruined my life.
* I'd had my account since I was 13 years old in 2008. I had a few thousand connections on there, many fleeting and superficial, but at least a few hundred with folks around the world that I care about and have no way of reaching now.
* 90% of communication here in NZ transpires via Facebook Messenger, so I was immediately cut off from my community and friends. What's worse, many have since told me that they were worried I'd blocked them.
* My income from the time came from selling trading cards in FB groups while I was closing an investment round. I lost the ability to do so, and had to move out of my apartment to live outside of the city with my in-laws.
* My father passed away a few years ago, and I had countless photos of him on my account, as well as our message history. This honestly hurt more than anything else.
All in all, this experience has left me a deep scar. I guess I needed to learn a lesson around not relying on one platform so heavily, and to some extent not backing things up such as the photos, but I really wish Facebook could have just done the reasonable thing and let me back in.
Finally, I have no idea if I was reported to the police/LE in any capacity regarding whatever was posted on my account to have me banned. Am I on some kind of list now?
A boring, technocratic dystopia.
edit: on the off chance anyone from Meta reads this and thinks they can help, I would be over the moon to get even a chance of having my account restored. I was told to speak to an Australian law firm who charge $3,500 to hound Facebook to get accounts restored in situations like mine, but unfortunately that's just not within my means.
Google protecting children is not important.
> This man is innocent of doing anything wrong
He is not entirely without fault: He negligently enabled surveillance of his personal files, including allowing Google to make copies of his son's genitalia / his son's private personal medicall information. He's not exactly innocent - but of course, his misdeed is not vis-a-vis the state or Google, but vis-a-vis his son, his wife and himself.
> We allow the state power to protect children
You don't allow the state anything. The state allows itself and you pretend we control the state because we get to make some choices via elections every once in a while.
For you, Google is your everything. For Google, you're an tiny ant. If a tiny ant steps out of line, they kill it. They don't feel bad about the ant; they don't feel anything. It's a free service and it's not worth the cost to literally do anything.
We have courts for a reason. They found no wrongdoing. Google is objectively deciding they know better than an elected court on what happened.
This whole situation is absurd and evil.
No Google software, devices, or data on their systems belongs to you. Sue them and they will remind you of this fact in detail.
If you want to own your digital life you will have to commit to being a pariah in your social circle that is ridiculed constantly for using open source tools.
I'd go a little broader than that. I'd also want to see them drag in whoever made the decision to not reinstate the account, plus everyone who knew what happened and could have overridden the decision but chose not to do so.
... But given the situation and high profile nature of this incident?
If that account's still locked, it's locked under sealed FBI warrant.
Google has had situations where they work hand-in-give with law enforcement to resolve something, and when they do, they're radio-silent on the situation. Sometimes for years, given the scope.
is protecting children more important than a software engineer with no backup's mistakes and first world inconveniences? yes.
the AI did its job flawlessly - detected a naked toddler. as did the human verifier. bravo. should it have been detected and flagged? yes.
should we be surprised at the chosen free cloud provider's attitude or dismissal? no.
Naked pre-teen? Sure flag absolutely. Toddler? No.
Literally every form nowadays requires a phone number
I think your friends are just a little too obsessed with social media. The only response I ever hear to "I don't have a facebook/twitter/whatever" is "yeah, that makes sense, I think about deleting mine all the time."
that will never happen, unless documents & emails get discovered and all the cc'ed people get subpoena'ed and deposed. And even that won't catch everybody. Congressional committees don't have time for that.
Big corporations are adept at diffusing real responsibility among a faceless mass of people.
> “I determined that the incident did not meet the elements of a crime and that no crime occurred,” Mr. Hillard wrote in his report. The police had access to all the information Google had on Mark and decided it did not constitute child abuse or exploitation.
> *The search, related to “child exploitation videos,” had taken place in February, within a week of his taking the photos of his son.*
So maybe no crime occurred, but google doesn't want that kind of user. I assume you can just type "child exploitation videos" into Google without breaking the law, but google may terminate your account.
You can similarly transfer domains between registrars if one of them doesn't like you. And in practice, your domain registrar not liking you is pretty rare; I've only heard of it happening with famously evil alt-right websites and they generally manage to find a registrar that will take their business.
Also, if people use archive.org explicitly to avoid paywalls, sites are just going to block archive.org, and then we won't have an Archive (to check whether the article gets updated, for instance).
How many? Like 1 percent of people?
> Archive links remove important info from the post
What type of information?
Imagine losing your contacts, your photos, your emails with clients, your cloud setup… because you had the humanity to take care of your child.
It is impossible to underestimate Google now.
Much worse - losing access to iCloud/iPhone would be disastrous
The sales slogan is something like, "All the costs of AWS, all the automation of a bare metal box!"
Ironically, more suitable to manually point-and-click or phone-call managed "lift and shift" than the infra-as-code clouds.
Their definition and yours are not exactly the same. If you read what they have to say, you'll see that the issues are more broad than whatever you personally call abuse, and those issues include exploitation and distribution of images that victims find harmful. Are you a victim of abuse or exploitation? Who are you to determine what a victim finds abusive or exploitative?
I'm not saying I agree with this situation, just that I can see how it happened and why Google won't do anything in this case.
My point is that the software is not working as intended. The intent is to stop child abuse, but the software they build does not identify child abuse it identifies what it believes to be naked (semi-naked?) minors. Those are two different things.
A photo you take of your kid for the doctor to see in order to treat them is not CSAM. Neither is a photo of your naked baby.
But those same photos if stolen from you or taken by others for different (less wholesome) reasons would be. But, and most importantly, that context is not to be found in the photo itself.
Also:
> we only have one side of the story here
In real court, if you don't show up to tell your side of the story, you're considered to be in the wrong by default. Why should the court of public opinion be any different, when Google has had the chance to tell their side but chose not to?
Ps. This “we will never really know” is triggered me. This phrase used by Russian propaganda when they got caught in crimes every damn time.
I'm not sure why we expect Google to provide transparency for CSAM bans/investigations. That would be highly irregular, and not just for Google.
The Dad has legal path(s) to take if he feels he was truly wronged. Paths that would ultimately cost nothing if he prevailed. Paths that would likely force Google to undo their decision if Dad's statements are in fact the truth and Google has no other data/evidence.
Dad chose not do do any of that though... why? I'm confident there are lawyers out there that would even represent Dad for free.
> This phrase used by Russian propaganda when they got caught in crimes every damn time.
What?
San Francisco Police Department:
> “I determined that the incident did not meet the elements of a crime and that no crime occurred,” Mr. Hillard wrote in his report. The police had access to all the information Google had on Mark and decided it did not constitute child abuse or exploitation.
What more do you want from him Alupis? He was exonerated but you are suggesting he did not "do any of that" (false) to clear his name. Why would you say this given the article already rules it out?
It says in the article that would have cost 7k.
Police reviewed the case with full access to all documents and videos.
A reputable news organization contacted Google for comment.
There was all the opportunity to present "other side of story" by Google if any. And I actually think everybody in article goes out of their WAY to present the other side - they repeatedly call google's work important but difficult and offer several plausible non malevolent reasons for the behaviour.
I agree life is complex and we rarely get all the details, but even I don't agree with a completely defeatist "life is unknowable" attitude.
Typically if you win arbitration or court, the losing party pays the lawyers anyway - so why did he not pursue this?
I think if someone was doing something criminal and their access was blocked, they will juat quietly walk away. But talking to the press? That would be a new level.
That's sadly not true. There are various examples of individuals loosing their domains as registrar's refuse to release them. The transfer only works if both registers play ball, so it's essentially a very similar situation.
A registrar revoked the domain, we tried to transfer.
The registrar required email verification of who we are, but for obvious reasons email wasn’t working.
Fun times.
I just want to know the context of that search that he made. It could very well be disqualifying, or it could be totally benign.
The point is that Google should have to say that, just like your water and electricity companies can't arbitrarily decide to stop serving you.
If my SO was surreptitiously taking nude pictures (videos?) of me and our kid while we were sleeping (and uploading them to the cloud!), I’d be pissed (and this is the most benign interpretation).
That said, there should still be due process.
Ultimately, I think it’s an issue with the local max of computing we’re trapped in. We need tools that can free us from dependence on a handful of centralized companies that have this kind of discretionary power over our lives.
The problem is, the alternative is this stuff runs rampant on their service, not something I'd want either.
So I understand their position, but their approach here is lacking.
I use fastmail and they allow you "alias" addresses. So even though my primary email is on my custom dimain e.g. myname@mydomain.com, Fastmail also gives me an alsia of myname@fastmail.com. That's the email I used to log in (to AWS) and manage my MX records.
If either Fastmail or AWS were to go rogue/broke, I like to think I would eventually be able to restore access to my domain even without email? Hope never to find out.
People would have said that about Googs at the beginning (being a decent company)
>Or if you have extra money, just pay the fee to become a registrar yourself.
yeah, cause just registering a domain and admining your own mail service isn't enough fun already, let's just make spinning up a new registrar part of the deal too? <eyeroll>
Apps, games, movies, books, youtube paid things, etc.
But that's why I back up my media in the first place, Google can't steal my epub of the book I bought, nor can audible steal the m4a of the audiobook I bought.
You're asking me for stats about a statistically non-existent problem you made up. How many article get changed after they get posted and this isn't brought up in the comments?
Also, sometimes articles get changed because authors respond to HN feedback. Interaction between authors and the community is one of the valuable things about the forum. There's no added value to discussing some frozen snapshot of a web page - its a web forum for talking about web links rather than some revision control system.
What type of information?
The domain, for one thing.
You are the one that said that people actually notice that... I was trying to find out where you got that from.
> The domain, for one thing.
you can get the domain name from the archived page...
Are you an HN admin trying to defend strange policies?
No, you said 'what if the page changes' which is not really a thing and when it's a thing, it's a totally normal thing. It's a non-problem that I got from your comment.
you can get the domain name from the archived page...
You can also get the archived page from the archived page, if you prefer the archived page.
Are you an HN admin trying to defend strange policies?
Posting an archive link breaks the feature which lets you view submissions by site: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=nytimes.com
A little paperwork and you get a nice cli tool to admin your domains, customer support directly from the registry. It's not a terrible option.
"If they were innocent, why didn't they sue" is an opinion that is really naive of how our legal system works.
In both cases there's 3 possible outcomes:
1) Google, after reviewing weak and/or zero evidence, backs down and restores the account upon receipt of notice of intent to pursue legal action.
2) Arbitration happens and Google is ordered to back down, restore the account and pay Dad's representation fees.
3) Arbitration happens and Dad loses, which yes would be quite costly.
Only #3 is a gamble, and it seems like Dad has a lot of confidence #3 isn't even a remote possibility. So why would you not pursue legal action?
Given how much attention Dad has received over this, it would be surprising if free representation wasn't throwing themselves at him by now too. Regardless, this is indeed how the legal system works for disputes. He should use it if he really is innocent.
From the article there appears to be an arbitration path (based on the dollar amount quoted in the article, but they talk about it like it would be a lawsuit) - but Dad explicitly chose not to take it for some reason.
It would be very surprising if the ToS for Google Accounts didn't include an arbitration agreement.
Also, Dad had a paid Google One account - filled with apparently lots of data. He definitely has a legal path here and chose not to take it. Why?
My guess would be it happens far more often that you might realize, given Google's scale and breadth of services offered (paid and unpaid).
People have disputes all the time with big companies, and arbitration is how they are normally resolved. Arbitration is designed to 1) usually minimize the public risk to the company in the event of a loss, and 2) make the proceedings far more affordable for all parties involved.
Arbitration carries all the same weight and enforcement of a real lawsuit, but takes less time and is less costly.
Hassle.
Some people would prefer to just have a clean break from any abusive relationship rather than continue to engage in conflict, even if the odds are good they'd win.
You also don't know what else is going on in his life and how much bandwidth he has left. One terminally sick relative is all it'll take for the average person to not want to deal with extra bullshit in their life.
And most people don't have their own personal legal department and may not even know a single lawyer, so they don't have any idea of who to trust. If a dozen lawyers called me up and offered their services the first headache I'm having is that I don't know if any of them are trustworthy, and now I need to waste my time vetting them.
So, I don't think hassle can accurately describe this particular case.
If he sues he's likely getting a pittance from whatever the court values his Google account to be worth. In reality this is never going to be a multi-million dollar award.
And I don't know what it is that you imagine he's done wrong which isn't criminal but which would allow Google to defend themselves. If it is anything I think it is more likely that he got legal advice that based on Google's TOS and the things that he agreed to (like we all do every time a legal notice pops up) that his chances of recovering any damages at all were a crapshoot.
There is no multi-million dollar award - this isn't a TV Show or something.
Arbitration would determine, after examining all facts presented by both parties, if his account should be re-instated. Further, if his account is ordered to be re-instated, he would be awarded "reasonable attorney's fees", which would cover the cost of any legal representation he hired to argue his case.
So yes, he needed to pursue the legal path here, but chose not to. The quoted dollar amount in the article is peanuts, and like previously stated over and over, if he's so certain of his innocence and has all this supporting evidence, arbitration would ultimately cost nothing. ie. there's no reason to not pursue the legal path here.
The claim is that he is a child pornographer and has taken sexually explicit photos of children for prurient purposes. There is no evidence of this and if Google had it they should report the evidence.
You instead keep repeating things like "if he's so certain of his innocence and has all this supporting evidence...", implying that since he is not suing Google that there must be something to this.
Your shtick here reminds me of Musk's accusations of pedophilia against Vernon Unsworth.