this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2026
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In the US companies(where the company is located last I knew) are legally mandated to report specific things such as CSAM and other things if they come across it.
What the issue should be isn't the fact that they are reporting it, the issue should be they have the capability to see it in the first place to be able to report it.
This isn't me defending CSAM or anything like that but, in a decent storage system, google shouldn't be able to even see what you have, let alone what the images actually are.
Today it's for CSAM. Tomorrow it could be for saying anything negative about dear leader. Our Constitution clearly won't protect us.
Not to get too pedantic, but dammit I just got off the phone with a lawyer. The constitution itself never did anything directly to the public. It outlines the powers given to and withheld from the main branches of the federal government of the US. Those branches empower the agencies that you expect to protect you. Yup, all the three letter agencies you hate.
They not only look at your files but will decrypt any encrypted zip files to see what you have.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37086814
That seems less like them decrypting encrypted archives and more like the zip format not encrypting filenames so they're easily read from the zip's metadata.
Which is still a privacy violation, to be clear, but not nearly on the same scale as somehow obtaining and using your passwords to decrypt data you yourself encrypted.
That was what someone claimed but it isn't true. Filenames are not accessible in an encrypted zip.
~~it depends on the type of zip encryption, the default doesn't encrypt metadata~~
edit: upon looking into it further, the other commenter is right, the zip format itself doesn't actually support encrypting metadata at all, you would need to use a different format such as 7z to obtain it.
They are visible, you can test this yourself. Open a password-protected zip with 7zip and it'll show the file list even without entering the password. The "encrypt file names" checkbox doesn't even appear when creating an archive if the zip format is selected, so I'm not sure the format supports it.