Comment by vgatherps
4 years ago
What's the incentive for Google to EVER give the accounts back? If they wrongly deactivate an account (like here), you get a bad article, EFF and friends ruminate about your behavior, and the world mostly moves on.
If Google wrongly gives an account back, you get a different article: "Google helped child pornographer even after discovering CP in their account". Now that gets attention. That's a scandal that leads to political action, criminal charges, etc.
To be clear, I'm not advocating for how Google behaves. They're a lot more like a utility and probably should be treated like one (alongside the protections and requirements that come of a utility, you don't hear "eletric company stopped serving house since man suspect of CP lives there").
For the responses saying "Well the police cleared them", again I don't disagree. But if you're an executive making this decision you're thinking:
1. We never give back an account in this case and avoid the massive downside risk
2. We go through a lot of work to design a process that will impact a marginal portion of customers and really really hope nobody manages to social engineer themselves past, and pray that no enterprising news outlet/politician tries to make the "Google helped CP person recover their CP story" - they already have a target on their back.
In what world would Google receive criticism for giving back accounts to people who has been proven innocent?
Google's surveillance system and automated ban hammers are already bad enough. But the actions they took following the ban in this case is egregious and 100% indefensible. At the very least, Google could've reinstated their victim's account and issued a full sincere apology upon being contacted by the NYT. If Google has any care for their users, they'd do that for every people they wrongly reported who had their names cleared. Instead, Google doubled down, continued to treat their victims as criminals in their statement, and even leaked details about intimate photos in a blatant attempt to discredit the users they wronged.
No parent should ever have to go through what Google has put them through when trying to cure their child. Most of all, they should never have to risk losing custody of their child because their child went sick. They should never lose access to their whole digital identity because they didn't know any better than to rely on Google. Yet this is what Google did to these parents, full stop.
>> If Google has any care for their users, they'd do that for every people they wrongly reported that had their names cleared. Instead, Google doubled down, continued to treat their victims as criminals in their statement, and even leaked details about intimate photos in a blatant attempt to discredit the users they wronged.
Google's users are advertisers. Ordinary people are data sources and ad viewers. Android phones and Chrome are for collecting data about people and showing them ads.
Google doesn't care about losing two data sources and ad viewers.
I edited my comment on this point and largely I agree, but as far as anyone in Google's position is concerned:
1. This is a rare edge case with asymmetric risk and an easy way to avoid said
2. A single failure could be catastrophic
3. No process is perfect especially in the face of someone actively trying to thwart it
You could try really hard to make sure it's not attackable and pray, for little benefit to Google. Or just tell people "too bad, you're on your own".
Even if this processes was assuredly bulletproof,
> In what world would Google receive criticism for giving back accounts to people who has been proven innocent?
The sort of drivel/clickbait that gets published to 'make a good story' is astounding. Or politicians, not known for honesty, could totally play this up if their base has an axe to grind against Google.
No giant corporation (especially publicly traded) is going to take such risks to revive a few wrongfully terminated email/photo accounts unless they have an obligation to (i.e. should Google be a utility). Their responsibilities aren't to be nice, or act in a good way, but to protect their profits. To the extent that I've seen corporations 'act nice' it's largely been to benefit their own employees or pursue some pet cause of an executive.
Is "proven innocent" a thing in the US?
(Your use of "full stop" suggests you're not American either - so I'll rephrase, "is proven innocent a thing in any English speaking country"? I actually don't know...)
Devil's advocate:
Proven innocent is not a thing, there is only "declined to prosecute [because there was no crime]."
If due process was followed, and the police / state exonerated the parents, I don’t think anyone would blame Google for reactivating the accounts. They’d blame the police or whatever flawed exoneration process was used.
At least, that’s what I’d hope.
Google here looks even worse than I thought possible, and I’m a de-Googled, anti-fan, so I already had a very dim view of them.
What if the police don't feel it's interesting enough yet (or don't have funds) to investigate and put things on the backburner for lack of resources? Similar to the mountains of unprocessed rape kits.
These are interesting cases but it seems like they happen to be ones where the police bothered do anything.
What's this exonerated?
They didn't do anything. Investigation/State scrutiny shouldn't be considered an act of guilt that requires a vouchsafing.
What's the incentive for Google to EVER give the accounts back?
Ethical, moral responsibility? Being a nice entity. And it takes zero effort to do so, especially once he is cleared by the cops?
You know, stuff like Don't be evil? Oh wait...
Employees of this office are very small and delicate, deserve protection from local pervs. Better a thousand innocent men are locked up than one guilty man roam free.
— Dwight K. Schrute
Google is not anything like a “utility”. A utility has a natural monopoly because of the effort, expense and disruption that is required to lay down the infrastructure and the need for scale. There is no product that Google has that you can’t and shouldn’t pay for a competitors product.