Error 404: Techie locked out of Google for uploading childhood bathing pics

Google has flagged a city-based 26-year-old techie's childhood pictures of being bathed by his parents, which he had stored in Google's storage, as "child being abused and exploited". The tech giant has blocked his access to email accounts, Google Drive, Photo, among others. The man, whose identity police are not revealing to protect his potential reputational harm, has lost access to the last ten years of his personal and professional data.

The man has approached Ahmedabad Cyber Cell police against Google Inc while stating that he is unable to use any personal or professional services such as Google Pay, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sheets, among others. The complaint said that Google locked him out of all services immediately without giving an "an option to review, download his important data or understand what content led to the notification being locked out of all his services."

Police said that the issue arose after the complainant digitised his childhood photos and uploaded them on Google photos in May. Few days later, he received a notification stating that his Google account had been blocked and was eventually locked out of all his devices.  

The notification read, "It looks like this account has content that involves a child being sexually abused or exploited. This is a severe violation of Google's policies and might be illegal..." The complainant tried to reason with the company about what exactly led to its decision. The complainant has said that the company has no other remedies apart from appeal which is decided by Artificial Intelligence. He has said that two appeals are allowed, both of which are conducted by AI.

"Upon conducting review of the physical copies of the photos to ascertain how this had happened, the aggrieved realised that his own photos of being happily bathed by his parents and playing in the water were part of the images uploaded, the only ones which had the prospect of being misconstrued as the alleged material," the complaint has told the Cyber Cell police.

A police officer, who is investigating the case, told DH that it looks like a case of "faulty algorithm due to which accounts are locked by Google or Facebook for no reason. They lebel anything under child rights violation and an AI based algorithm locks the accounts."

The 26-year-old is a resident of Ahmedabad whose father works as a lawyer in Gujarat high court. He has done B.Tech in Information and Communication from a well-known institute and is currently self-employed. He is working in the area of Artificial Intelligence, coding and technical consulting in green energy.

The complainant has said that he is highly dependent on Google services for personal and professional use. "This dependancy further increased by the use of an Android phone that collates all personal data on Google's service. In addition to this, the aggrieved also avails a paid service from Google which provides him with an additional 2TB of data storage across all platforms he has attached to his Google account," the complainant has said.

"The aggrieved has lost access to all his personal data that he has on his Google platforms alongside losing access to the use of Google's services through his Google account based on an allegation that is untrue, obscene and defamatory," the complaint stated.