According to the company, which insisted it was not talking about this specific case, a “sexual content” email is only sent in cases of child abuse, not adult porn. Google did offer this newspaper access to employees on condition that their identities would not be revealed and that they would not be quoted verbatim. But Barberá has yet to receive any details. The company said it would only share that information with the concerned party. When EL PAÍS asked about Barberá's case, Google replied that they could not provide that information because of privacy laws, since the user involved is European. Google told the reporter that the problematic images were photos of children’s genitalia that two parents had taken to send to the pediatrician for a skin problem. In August, The New York Times published a story with two similar cases in the US. Barberá has also lost class material, a blog that he kept, and his YouTube account, not to mention other services that he had contracted with his email, from Amazon to Netflix to a German music app. The loss of the Google account does not only mean that his photos and videos are gone. “I have everything there from the last 14 years, and for the last five years, I only have it there,” says Barberá, alluding to the fact that he does not keep files on external drives. The message said: “We believe that your account contained sexual content that may violate Google’s terms of service and may also be prohibited by law.” But then it added: “We have removed this content” and “if you continue to violate our policies, we may terminate your Google account.” This message was received on August 26 and, although it sounds like a warning, the account is still suspended. Out of this entire process, Barberá only got one concrete answer, and it was a message addressed to his wife’s email (which he had added as a secondary account). At that point he asked a relative who works in journalism for help, and eventually managed to chat with an alleged Google employee who asked him for “patience.” Sexual content He filed several claims, answered emails from apparent Google employees who asked for new details (and who called themselves Nahuel, Rocío, Laura), and called all the company phones he could find without ever being able to talk to a human. Within minutes of starting the process, Google disabled his account with a message saying that “harmful content” had been found. In order to better organize the material, he started uploading everything to his Google Drive account, for which he still pays every month in order to have two terabytes of cloud storage space. In July of this year, Barberá needed some music files that he had on old hard drives. He describes a desperate experience of helplessness as he fought to speak to a human being at Google and find out how exactly he had violated the company’s abuse policies. He only began to connect the dots after reading messages in online forums and news articles. Could there be child pornography or terrorism in there? There could,” explains Barberá in a long telephone conversation.Īt first Barberá had no clue why he had been locked out of his account. “The only thing I can think of is that maybe I uploaded something I shouldn’t have uploaded, like movies I downloaded back in the days of eMule. “It was the safest thing that occurred to me so that Javi’s music would not be lost, as the children were very young then.”īarberá, a 46-year-old high school teacher from Valencia, in eastern Spain, had not foreseen a key detail: Google’s terms of service conceal a system that disables accounts when it detects prohibited content, including sexual material involving children or terrorism. “So I signed up for the Google Drive service,” he says. He wanted to store music files so that his friend’s children would one day hear how their father played. Five years ago, following the death of a friend and bandmate, David Barberá decided to pay for a Google Drive cloud account.
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