I read an interesting thread on Reddit’s Dropbox sub yesterday.  Long story short, a user’s account was disabled because of baby photos.

It appears the user’s baby photos were tagged as CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material).

We haven’t seen the photos in question, but let’s give the user the benefit of the doubt and assume they were not created for CSAM purposes.  What I’m guessing happened is that some automated image review tool scanned the content of the photos and flagged them.

In other words, some piece of code looked at the photos and made a judgement, which on the face of it is absurd.

I Have Pics of My Naked Kids, Too

It’s not that unusual, really.  I have a picture of my daughter moments after her birth and she’s – gasp! – topless.  I have pics of kids playing in the tub.

Given the endless depravity of humans, I’m sure someone out there would consume such pictures as CSAM, but are they really classified that way legally?

I just googled “newborn baby” and found pagefuls of pics of cute baby girls with pink ribbons in their hair who were half naked  in their cribs, and I’m sure if I googled more I could find full nudity.

I’m not an expert, but my understanding is:

• Ordinary family photos such as newborns during baths or at the hospital are not CSAM.
• These are understood as non-sexual, innocent, and typical parental documentation.
• If the picture is intentionally sexualized in any way, that’s totally different – e.g., focus on genitals, suggesting posing, accompanying text, etc.

You’re At Dropbox’s Mercy

All these big tech cloud services have a “can terminate service at our discretion” clause and typically all they owe you is to stop billing.  Big tech seems to operate on the model that their services are infallible and getting a human involved to appeal a machine-made decision is nigh impossible.

And by the way, why is Dropbox scanning your private photos?

The user in this thread seems to be on the verge of giving up.  Hopefully he or she has other backups of these photos, because it would be a shame if they were lost forever because of a judgement made by an intelligence that is incapable of having kids.

raindog308

Raindog308 is a longtime LowEndTalk community administrator, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, Raindog runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.

Beyond the command line, Raindog is a lover of German Shepherds, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.

His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.

You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.