As a small point of order, they did not get banned for "finding CSAM" like the outrage- and clickbait title claims. They got banned for uploading a data set containing child porn to Google Drive. They did not find it themselves, and them later reporting the data set to an appropriate organization is not why they got banned.
>They got banned for uploading child porn to Google Drive
They uploaded the full "widely-used" training dataset, which happened to include CSAM (child sexual abuse material).
While the title of the article is not great, your wording here implies that they purposefully uploaded some independent CSAM pictures, which is not accurate.
Literally every headline that 404 media has published about subjects I understand first-hand has been false.
I’m the person who got banned. And just to be clear: the only reason I have my account back is because 404 Media covered it. Nobody else would touch the story because it happened to a nobody. There are probably a lot of “nobodies” in this thread who might someday need a reporter like Emanuel Maiberg to actually step in. I’m grateful he did.
The dataset had been online for six years. In my appeal I told Google exactly where the data came from — they ignored it. I was the one who reported it to C3P, and that’s why it finally came down. Even after Google flagged my Drive, the dataset stayed up for another two months.
So this idea that Google “did a good thing” and 404 somehow did something wrong is just absurd.
Google is abusing its monopoly in all kinds of ways, including quietly wiping out independent developers: https://medium.com/@russoatlarge_93541/déjà-vu-googles-using...