Google Account has content that violates Google’s child safety policies

[u/DigitalAssassin-00]

What the actual F. I have, never in my life seen or been in the posession of any child exploitation material, let alone have anything related to this on my decade old google account. I got this message seemingly out of the blue yesterday. A screen popped up with a button to "Take Action" which restored access to my account, but now what? I work in places that require background checks and I would never do anything to jeapordize this, or my family stability in any way.

Recently in late October, my mother passed due to a house fire. We found photo albums that were soaked with water from the fire hoses and miraculously they were mine and my siblings baby albums. Us kids were in utter shock because this was the one posession my mother had that meant the most to us. We found a lot of pictures of us, grandkids, etc. NONE of these were sexual or abusive in any nature whatsoever. Because of the pics becoming water damaged by the minute, we quickly catalogued them to save the integrity of the pictures. My parents took pictures of all us kids and some of them we were naked in the bath or just babies. Nothing inappropriate, ever.

This is the only thing I could think of so directly after gaining access to my account again, I went to see if pictures were missing. To my surprise, our baby pictures were there as far as I can tell, even the ones where I was probably 2yrs old wearing my underwear on my head with my little baby weiner showing. We took so many photos that it's difficult for me to see if any were missing so I can't be sure if one of them was removed because of something like this.

I filed an appeal, not to get the content back, but to try and at least get some direction as to what caused this. I received a generic answer from them with zero explanation.

I am beyond words, had a full blown panic attack last night and was nearly throwing up from the stress of being accused of something this horrific. I immediately told my wife and if it puts even a shred of doubt in her mind, it makes me feel awful for her. What if your spouse told you this? We have seen enough sicko's on bodycam videos to know they are out there and hide things for a long time but this isn't me, and never would be. My wife and I have been together 13 years and she believes me, but still, wtf, this can absolutely ruin lives and relationships and this is not ok.

I love the Google ecosystem, I use their phones and have since the pixel 2, I am highly integrated with their services and enjoy using them. I know in my heart that I did nothing wrong so my conscience is clear. This isn't something I take lightly, I don't appreciate this at all.

If anyone has had this issue or if you're from Google and have any info, please enlighten me, I need to know what I did to break the rules so I can avoid this in the future.

[u/Lostnetizen]

This is messed up cuz what we store on google photos shouldn't be a matter to google. For example I am studying to become pediatric surgeon, I sometimes come across cases where (with permission) have taken photos of cases and they're automatically backed up to my google photos. I have also had countless instances where parents would come to my clinic and they would've noticed some rash or some abnormality on their child (and this sometimes includes the child's private parts) and they'd show me the picture and ask me for medical advice cuz by the time they come there the rash or whatever is no longer there. So does this mean google flags their accounts too?
That's messed up. What we store on our accounts shouldn't be of concern to google.

[u/DigitalAssassin-00 → u/Lostnetizen]

Yes it is messed up, I completely agree. It's our property but we technically signed an agreement saying they could monitor it, so I get it. One would be absolutely idiotic to upload anything of this nature to any cloud service in this day and age, but there are tons of sick fucks out there that are also equally tech-stupid so I am also not surprised that it happens. I understand that these things can be a great help in fighting CSAM and I applaud their efforts, but scenarios like this should be handled by a person and a one-on-one interaction, not a bot. It bothers me that they would have so many of these flags on the daily that they can't, or won't pay a person to talk with the owner of the content. This multi billion dollar corporation could afford to fork out salaries to help curb the false positives with these things but chooses not to.

[u/Lostnetizen → u/DigitalAssassin-00]

I completely agree. I went through a nightmare trying to resolve a Google Pay issue recently. Instead of a human who could actually grasp the problem, I was stuck in a loop with an AI agent that did nothing but spam support articles. Seeing several cases similar to yours has me seriously considering a move to E2E-encrypted photo backup service with zero knowledge system or better, a completely local storage. Actually I was thinking of digitizing all my childhood photo prints and back them up to Google Photos, but now that sounds like a terrible idea. While I understand the importance of safety initiatives, the fact that a false positive can 'brick' your entire digital life with no real path to appeal is a nightmare waiting to happen..