Google’s Automated Child Abuse Detection Wrongfully Flagged a Parent’s Naked Photo of His Child

August 21, 2022

Google's automated child safety system, aiming to combat online child abuse, inadvertently flagged a parent's photo intended for a healthcare provider. This unfortunate incident led to a false police report of child abuse, subsequently restricting the individual's access to his online accounts and information.

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Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MEASURE 2.10 — similarity 0.663, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.656, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 4.1 — similarity 0.653, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: google
Alleged developer: google
Alleged harmed parties: a-software-engineer-named-mark, parents-using-telemedicine-services

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/303

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.