Except that it isn’t: it’s an adaptation for a British context of what happened to “Mark”, a father in San Francisco, as vividly recounted recently in the New York Times by the formidable tech journalist Kashmir Hill. Nightmarish, eh? But at least it’s hypothetical. The images were reviewed by a human, who decided they were innocent, as did the police. They’re here because you’re suspected of holding and passing on illegal images. Outside are two police officers, one male, one female.
Two days later, there’s a knock on the door. Shortly afterwards, you receive Google’s response: the company will not reinstate your account. Nor can you access any photograph or video you’ve ever taken with your phone, because they all reside on Google’s cloud servers – to which your device had thoughtfully (and automatically) uploaded them. Now, though, you no longer have access to your diary, address book and all those work documents you kept on Google Docs. At which point you discover that you no longer have Gmail, but fortunately you have an older email account that still works, so you use that. Never mind – there’s a form you can fill out explaining the circumstances and requesting that Google rescind its decision.
Suddenly, the penny drops: Google thinks that the photographs you sent constituted child abuse! You click on the “learn more” link and find a list of possible reasons including “child sexual abuse and exploitation”. Your account has been disabled because of “harmful content” that was “a severe violation of Google’s policies and might be illegal”. Two days later, you find a message from Google on your phone.
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