A San Francisco father took photos of his young son's penis on his cell phone and sent them to his wife.
He feared that he had an infection and wanted to get the pictures to the pediatrician.
Two days later, Google notified him that his account had been suspended because he had "seriously" violated company policies, he told The New York Times.
The notification that Mark received on his phone in February 2021 said that Google had disabled his account due to "harmful content", according to the cited media.
A link directed him to a list of possible reasons;
one of them was “sexual abuse and exploitation of minors”.
And since then he could no longer access his contacts, emails or photos of him and
the police started an investigation against him.
Shortly after submitting his appeal, Google responded that it would not reinstate his account and did not provide any further explanation.
Later, the police closed the case and determined that no crime had been committed.
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Mark then filed another appeal and attached the police report but the company did not respond either.
"I knew that these companies were watching and that privacy is not what we expected it to be," the man told that medium, "but I have not done anything wrong."
Mark is not the only one who has faced scenarios like this.
In Houston, Texas, Cassio's son had an infection in his private parts and, at the request of the pediatrician, he took photos with his cell phone and sent them to his wife through the Google chat service .
His account was also disabled and the purchase of a house was hindered.
“It was a headache,”
she assured.
The police also investigated him but, after showing the messages he had exchanged with the pediatrician, he was immediately acquitted.
“There could be tens, hundreds, and thousands of cases like these,” Jon Callas, a technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation digital civil liberties organization, told the quoted media.
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He was also unable to recover his Google account.
Every year, images of exploited or sexually abused children are detected by tech giants using artificial intelligence tools that allow many images to be quickly tracked.
In 2021 alone, Google filed more than 600,000 reports of child abuse material and disabled the accounts of more than 270,000 users, according to the aforementioned media.