Comment by bborud
4 years ago
This highlights the enormous risk depending on Google, and similar service providers, for email, messaging and other important services is. It isn't so much the policies, but the fact that Google will never do anything to help you when they get it wrong.
You are always only one algorithmic fuck-up away from losing access and having to spend days and weeks dealing with the consequences.
I think the only way to deal with this is through regulation. Make it as inconvenient for Google to ignore customers as it is inconvenient for customers to be ignored by their service provider when something goes wrong.
Systemic mistreatment of customers ought to have consequences of existential proportions to a company. There is no societal benefit to companies like Google getting away with behaving this poorly.
The best way to solve this is to DE-regulate. Make Google etc explicitly not responsible for proactively monitoring people's private data and then said data will remain private.
Do you think Google et-al have done a good job of keeping their noses out of your business? In fact, I would challenge you to compare privacy in the EU vs the US.
Opinions on what should be done have more credibility when based in observable reality rather than blind ideology.
They aren’t obligated to actively scan for this material (see Apple).