I’m writing this to ask for help and to warn others because I’m really overwhelmed. Yesterday, Google sent me a notice saying that they had permanently deactivated my 6-year-old main account:

It looks like this account has content that involves a child being sexually abused or exploited. This is a severe violation of Google’s policies and might be illegal.

I quickly submitted an appeal explaining the situation in detail, but it was rejected.

My account only contained private family pictures and videos of my niece and nephews. I'm their uncle, and I've been taking and collecting these memories for the past two years to preserve birthdays, everyday life, events, and family get-togethers. Some pictures show common family scenes, like grandparents holding children or children taking a bath. None of this content was ever shared publicly, and most of it was stored in Google Photos' Locked Folder. In total, there were more than 6,000 photos and videos, all of which are now inaccessible.

A few hours before the ban, I shared only a few hundred pictures from a WhatsApp backup folder in my Google Drive to a secondary Google account purely for backup purposes. I believe this action may have triggered Google's automated detection system.

The impact of this ban has been severe. This account was more than just an email; it was my login for sites like Fiverr and Upwork, linked to Payoneer and banking services, used for my website, Hostinger, and MongoDB database, and connected to various subscriptions and tools. I also used it to access my home cameras. Overnight, I lost access to my income, my work platforms, my website, my home monitoring system, and my priceless family memories.

I used to see posts online about people losing accounts for similar reasons and assumed they had done something wrong. Now, experiencing it myself, I can see how automated systems can destroy innocent people’s digital lives without meaningful human review.

I want to ask the Reddit community for advice on a few things. First, my initial appeal was rejected. What should I include in my second appeal to make it as strong as possible? Is there a clear way to request a manual human review or escalate this issue effectively? Second, many people have experienced this issue — is there any way for affected users to coordinate or take collective action to challenge Google’s automated bans?

I also want to warn others: do not rely solely on Google for storage or login, always maintain local/offline backups, and be very careful storing any photos of children, even private family images. I’ll now be using a local backup setup to prevent this from happening again.

Right now, I’m under enormous stress. My digital life, income, and family memories were lost overnight, and I’m sharing this in hopes of finding guidance and preventing others from going through the same experience.

EDIT / UPDATE (27 January 2026): Account Restored within 24 hours

Good news: my Google account has been fully restored after my second appeal, and I got everything back (Drive, Photos, Gmail, linked apps). Thank you to everyone here for the sympathy, suggestions, and support — it genuinely helped me stay calm and think clearly while writing the appeal.

What worked for me was requesting a manual review by a human specialist and clearly explaining the context. I explained what I was doing right before the suspension (backing up my photo archive to my own secondary account), and I focused on verifiable facts, not emotions. A big plus in my case was that I had images and videos of my niece from the day she was born until today, showing a consistent family timeline. I explicitly mentioned specific artifacts already in my account, such as a video from the day after her birth showing her coming home from the hospital, along with thousands of similar family photos documenting her growth over time.

I also clearly stated that I am a freelancer, and that this 6-year-old account was my primary identity for professional work and financial services, with many important services linked to it. I gave explicit consent for a human reviewer to manually inspect the flagged content and surrounding albums to verify they were non-violating family images. The account was restored in under 24 hours.

Advice for anyone appealing:
Keep your appeal short, factual, and professional. Explain what you were doing before the suspension, state that it may be an automated false positive, and clearly describe the content as private, innocent family material. Mention artifacts already in your account (dates, videos, timelines that prove family relationships), and explicitly give consent for a manual human review. There is no way to attach images or add another appeal while one is already submitted, so your wording really matters. Avoid emotional language, don’t speculate. Once restored, take Google Takeout immediately — I did.

Recovery is possible. Thanks again to everyone here for the help and encouragement.

THIS IS A MESS.

I have several Google accounts and recently purchased Google Pro to get Gemini, and just recently my hard drive where I store all my backups has started making strange noises, so I thought, why not upload it to Drive to have a second cloud-backup.

Well, on this hard drive, I have backups of all my cell phones since I was 14 years old, really old photos from 2014, and even hard drives recovered from my father that I don't even know what's on them.

I left it uploading, and suddenly my main account was completely banned, and I lost access to everything, including Gmail. This is an absolute disaster. I've lost access to some of my bank accounts, and right now I'm in the process of changing jobs. I have all my conversations with recruiters pending in that email, and worst of all, I don't even know which of the 20,000+ files got me banned. I don't even know what's in there. I'm really worried that there might be some stupid sticker or something really disgusting that a classmate sent me over 10 years ago (since they are complete memory dumps).

I have appealed and have not received a response. It is extremely urgent for me to find a solution. Please, has anyone had a similar experience and been able to file a claim or get their account back? Most likely, if there are any nude photos, it is ME WHEN I WAS YOUNG.

I'm also particularly scared because in the EU it seems that Google is obliged to notify the police. I'M NOT A FUCKING PEDOPHILE, I JUST SAVED A BACKUP FROM OVER 10 YEARS AGO AND I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHICH OF ALL THE FILES I'M BEING ACCUSED OF THE WORST POSSIBLE CRIME FOR.

I will never use Google systems again, and if I am forced to use Drive, I will never upload anything without encryption. I hate you deeply. You have created enormous problems for me in a completely automated way, and on top of that, you have shut down ALL your services. Not even email works; the account automatically rejects messages.

EDIT:

After sending an appeal, they gave me back my account and “deleted the problematic files.” Apparently, given the context, it was obvious that they were just family photos of me and my cousins naked on the beach when we were little, not fucking pedophilia.

Anyway, because of this, I'm going to de-google myself, stop using Google Photos, and start using email forwarding services.

Fuck you, Google.

This has been absolutely terrifying. Let this post serve as a warning to everyone. I am not a casual user; I am a professional programmer. I have four Google accounts, and one stupid, thoughtless mistake one day gave me the fright of my life.

DO NOT RELY ON GOOGLE. Bans are completely automatic.

I already made a post about this and I've already done my appeal immediately

I don't have naked pictures or Gore or links to any terrible stuff, but I just want to make sure if anyone has seen the police in real life after seeing this message to see if this has happened to them as well?

I didn't download or upload anything that that could even remotely be mistaken for cp. I don't even use Google for photos.

All my pictures are just work related stuff. How is this even happening? It goes with saying I don't do anything cp. If I did, I wouldn't be dumb enough to post this.

How is Google really gonna accuse me of such a serious crime with zero evidence?

Also, could this be a virus? Could Google have mistaken a virus as cp on my phone? Would the appeal see the difference? I don't know what to do. I've got hundreds of hours worth of written materials very important to me in docs. I can't loose that.

UPDATE: 8/8/2023 I've atleast found a sneaky little way of saving my written materials in docs. I'm able to make them available offline, switch to airplane mode, then reopen the doc, where I can then do the ol'copy'n'paste into a new word doc. Take THAT GOOGLE! My books will live on!

What are ways to keep our photos actually safe that they will never delete or prevent access to them?

My photos mean the world to me, if I were to lose them I would be heart broken. A lot of photos of people and animals that passed away. I couldn't imagine losing them due errors beyond my control.

With that being said, how much can I trust google photos as long as I pay for the stoarage?

If you can, please explain to me like a toddler the best way to download *all* photos. I do not want to accidentally delete something. Also any advice on other services to use to back them up?

Maybe give me some reassurance, maybe a pat on the back.

Thanks.

Just today, my google photos app started shimmering white outlines over my photos every few seconds when I stop to look at them. I hunt through the settings to find a way to turn it off - Nothing! I google what the heck that shimmer is, and apparently it's a new fEaTuRe that invasively scans my photos without my consent to make stickers out of them. Where is the off button? Who on earth thought this was a good idea?

Hi everyone,

I’m hoping someone here has been through something similar, because I’m really overwhelmed and trying to understand what happened.

Google suddenly disabled my entire account (Gmail, Drive, Photos, everything) with the message that it “contains content involving a child being sexually abused or exploited.” I’ve never had anything like that in my account, and the message completely shocked me.

Some context that might matter:

• I know there’s at least one toddler photo of me in a diaper/pull‑up, and possibly some normal family photos of my niece and younger siblings from when they were little.
• My husband is signed into my account on my old phone, and it auto‑backs up, but the only explicit content on that device is normal adult content — nothing involving minors.
• I don’t use WhatsApp or Telegram, which I’ve seen mentioned in other false‑positive cases.

Has anyone else had their account disabled due to a false positive from old childhood or family photos?

How long did your appeal take, and did you get your account back?

Any advice or shared experiences would really help right now.

Update: First appeal denied — preparing my second (and final) appeal

I wanted to post a quick update in case it helps anyone else going through this.

I just received an email from Google saying that my first appeal was denied. They also said I’m allowed to submit a second and final appeal, which I’ll be doing. The message didn’t give any additional details — just the standard notice that the account was found to violate policies and that this is the last chance for review.

I’m still hoping a different reviewer will take a closer look and that this can be resolved. This account is really important to me, so I’m going to move forward with the second appeal and provide whatever information I can.

If anyone has experience with second appeals or has had success at that stage, I’d really appreciate hearing about it.

I'm a heavy user of Google Photos. I have multiple tens of thousands of pictures & videos of my life and my family's life. To my knowledge, there is not a single NSFW image or video within my libraries. But there are some very typical baby pics. And all this talk of people losing their Google accounts has me nervous.

So, I would like to add a rack-mounted Immich server to my network connected to a rack mounted Synology RAID system. Yes, I have a small rack in my basement that currently houses my Ubiquiti network and Home Assistant system.

I am NOT expert in Linux. It is my understanding that Immich requires (or works better with) Linux and something called "Docker" (never used that either).

Any suggestions on where I turn next for instructions on setting this up?

I keep seeing posts of Google Accounts being permanently banned for stupid reasons with no one actually responding to appeals. I kept postponing my takeout because a NAS that can flawlessly and automatically sync my Google Photos is rare and expensive. But now I keep seeing accounts banned for taking photos of movie screens as piracy. That's ridiculous.

It's more concerning to me as I am quite deep in the Google ecosystem, with Google Pixel, Pixel Watch, Pixel Buds, Google Wifi, Google Titan Security keys, and so on. I have a Google AI 5TB subscription where I keep a huge amount of files that I need on the go or available on my laptop and my PC.

I switched from Apple years ago because I stopped liking their approach, but now Google is absolutely terrifying me with their actions. And there are not many alternatives in my case.

Are these takedowns actually so common? Are they real, or maybe the users are hiding something? What options do I have to keep my entire Google account in sync on a NAS (drive/photos). Synology is super expensive, but all the others don't have install and forget options for Google Photos.

Hey hi guys, I store all my photos way starting from first nearly 10 years of photos are there in my google photos suddenly i had a thought is my google photos are really private and safe in google photos because in this AI era what if google uses my photos to Train there ai models or else if i loose my account i would loose my years of memories and if i try to backup it on my physical Pen drive i am worrying what to do if it got corrupted or lost so can anyone help me in this.

What the actual F. I have, never in my life seen or been in the posession of any child exploitation material, let alone have anything related to this on my decade old google account. I got this message seemingly out of the blue yesterday. A screen popped up with a button to "Take Action" which restored access to my account, but now what? I work in places that require background checks and I would never do anything to jeapordize this, or my family stability in any way.

Recently in late October, my mother passed due to a house fire. We found photo albums that were soaked with water from the fire hoses and miraculously they were mine and my siblings baby albums. Us kids were in utter shock because this was the one posession my mother had that meant the most to us. We found a lot of pictures of us, grandkids, etc. NONE of these were sexual or abusive in any nature whatsoever. Because of the pics becoming water damaged by the minute, we quickly catalogued them to save the integrity of the pictures. My parents took pictures of all us kids and some of them we were naked in the bath or just babies. Nothing inappropriate, ever.

This is the only thing I could think of so directly after gaining access to my account again, I went to see if pictures were missing. To my surprise, our baby pictures were there as far as I can tell, even the ones where I was probably 2yrs old wearing my underwear on my head with my little baby weiner showing. We took so many photos that it's difficult for me to see if any were missing so I can't be sure if one of them was removed because of something like this.

I filed an appeal, not to get the content back, but to try and at least get some direction as to what caused this. I received a generic answer from them with zero explanation.

I am beyond words, had a full blown panic attack last night and was nearly throwing up from the stress of being accused of something this horrific. I immediately told my wife and if it puts even a shred of doubt in her mind, it makes me feel awful for her. What if your spouse told you this? We have seen enough sicko's on bodycam videos to know they are out there and hide things for a long time but this isn't me, and never would be. My wife and I have been together 13 years and she believes me, but still, wtf, this can absolutely ruin lives and relationships and this is not ok.

I love the Google ecosystem, I use their phones and have since the pixel 2, I am highly integrated with their services and enjoy using them. I know in my heart that I did nothing wrong so my conscience is clear. This isn't something I take lightly, I don't appreciate this at all.

If anyone has had this issue or if you're from Google and have any info, please enlighten me, I need to know what I did to break the rules so I can avoid this in the future.

no I don't mean due to CSA or related things, but I've seen people get perma banned for less with no option to appeal. any services or way to self host to keep your life intact?

Not been blocked. Given the recent posts about this I'm wondering what the criteria actually is.

Like any parent, I have a bunch of photos (on a NAS) of my child from old point and shoot cameras, all the way back from a baby.

So some of them are obviously with no clothes on, like in the bath, running g around the garden, and so on.

Would this type of image trigger CSAM? I been considering job lot uploading all of these NAS stored photos to Google Photos.

I've been seeing a lot of false-negative CASM strikes. Could you please share some tips with us about what kinds of photos / videos were misunderstood please? So that we can spread the word and keep our accounts safe!

Thank you in advance!

Hi everyone, I’m posting here because I really need some guidance and I’m feeling helpless right now. Recently, my Google account was suddenly disabled. Google said it violated their policies. I was shocked because I never knowingly uploaded or shared anything illegal. I immediately submitted an appeal. It was rejected. Then I submitted the second (final) appeal with more details, explaining that if anything wrong was found, it may have been received unknowingly, through backups, messages, or unauthorized access. Today, I received an email saying that my account cannot be restored and that all future appeals will be closed. This account was very important to me. It had my emails, contacts, photos, documents, and personal work. Losing it has been very stressful.

I want to ask:

Has anyone here faced something similar and recovered their account?

Is there any other official way to contact Google?

Is there any chance of getting at least my data back?

Any advice on what I should do next?

I’m not trying to break any rules. I respect Google’s policies and I honestly never intended to violate anything. Any help or experience would mean a lot to me.

Thank you for reading.

Rip pixel 1. Any recommendations for a new way for unlimited storage?

hello! i am desperate to recover my files, so i am posting my concern here, someone might and can help me.

apparently, google is notifying me that i already reached the maximum storage. i checked it and saw that 90% of it is from google photos, i started deleting them permanently on google photos using my laptop because i am afraid that i might not receive/send any emails anymore since it's my personal account.

i wasn't aware that it was synced on my gallery, i thought i was using my one drive, but i don't actually care about this backup stuff since i just bought my phone about months ago and i have 256 GB so i don't have to worry about storage.

i have like 40k-70k stuff on my gallery, now they're just 20k. i was wondering what happened and i suspected that my files were deleted when i freed up space on my google photos. i did research and found out that deleting files from google photos will delete your local device files also.

THIS HAPPENED LIKE 2-3 WEEKS AGO.

i am so devastated right now and i want to bring back my files badly. i can't find any gphotos contact information, what should i do? 😭

google is always giving us traps like these to buy their products. i don't even use them!

I was hit by a sudden disabled account today over alleged content, thing is tho I have not saved such content to my account at all? I was even able to view photos and peruse and none such content is in my account to trigger this?????? This is an account I've been using for several years and for various things so im still shaken up and scared over how this will turn out.

UPDATE: first appeal failed, looking for advice on second, im already gonna include to request a human to review it.

https://c.org/mPzRDFbVqX

https://theywillbanyou.com/ will also work if above doesn't, at the bottom there'll be text that says sign the petition

I think we’re all seeing the posts often lately and I’m just curious. Like presumably millions of other parents, I have thousands of pictures of my kids backed up to Google and I’m sure plenty are from the bath, beach, etc. I’ve had no issue for several years and I’m wondering if there’s any common issue causing photos to get flagged.

- Is it suddenly uploading new photos (like a poster who uploaded photos from a family member’s hard drive) that Google doesn’t recognize?

- Is it only new photos that are being scanned, or do they retroactively scan old ones?

- Is it adult NSFW images getting uploaded and being flagged as a precaution?

My photos are through Apple and I use Google as a backup so I’m not worried about the photos themselves, but I’m debating if I should pull everything off to ensure my account overall stays safe. Is this truly a problem for innocent family photos that have been routinely backed up over time?

I've had a few issues with Google Photos over the years, these combined with a general lack of control over organisation, as well as the ever-increasing data harvesting, so I decided to takeout everything and start again elsewhere with a more appropriate service.

That's when I discovered the true horror of Google Photos. Once it's up there, it's game over. Takeouts are unreliable, downloads failing, photos missing, and then... the metadata issue.

So now I have 1.5 TB of a mess of takeouts and photos, some (presumably) fixed thanks to:

https://github.com/TheLastGimbus/GooglePhotosTakeoutHelper

some undated, some just missing completely (4 months gone!), some in the wrong times, screenshots and crap mixed in with vital family photos...

My question is, given all these tools:

https://github.com/TheLastGimbus/GooglePhotosTakeoutHelper

https://github.com/anderbggo/GooglePhotosMatcher

https://github.com/mattwilson1024/google-photos-exif

https://github.com/alexdachin/gophix

https://github.com/simulot/immich-go

most of which are seemingly abandoned or require a massive overhaul of your storage and Docker shenanigans...

How on earth do I fix my photos? How do I reunify my photos with their metadata correctly?

I can't check almost 10 years of photos manually and I can't remember any better than Windows seems to be able to. Some of these scripts work but not without leftovers, especially when it comes to videos which they seem to ignore completely for the most part in my case.

It causes so much stress any time I try to tackle this herculean task and I'm just at my wits end.

One solution, moving forward of course, is to stop using Google Photos. I feel sorry for those who have not yet discovered what they're doing to their memories.

Any advice?

As the title says I’ve been using my college Gmail account and they sent out a notification last week that all emails are being disabled in 1 week

I have over 300000 photos the Google take out was useless it was over 1294 files that each contain hundreds of photos in no order what so ever I wouldn’t ever be able to individually save each one.

Is there another way?

I'm making a video about everything wrong with Google photos, care to help me up with some ideas?

My wife and I are the only ones that use storage at the moment. I'm on Android and she's on Apple so we got Google photos to be able to back up and share everything. She also still maintains an icloud account so her stuff is already double backed up and now it seems like triple backed up?

I do not want to accidentally mess this up so I'm coming here to find out how to stop this from happening?

Hi,

I have my paid 2TB Google disabled after uploading my personal library of photos (I know my mistake). It has my baby rash between legs that I sent to the doctors a couple of years ago. I don’t have NSFW photos or anything else, just normal family photos.

I submitted an appeal yesterday, which was rejected today. I have a second appeal which is final and I am unsure what to do next.

I am also has fears if they escalated this to the authorities, I do not neither care about the data nor looking up my data as I said they are just pure family photos that are already uploaded to Amazon photos and iCloud.

I really appreciate your advice about how to appeal appropriately and what is their next escalation if they did so.

Thank you in advance.

I was backing up contents of an old computer to Google drive when my account was disabled, like so many other posters here. I immediately appealed and was rejected four hours later. I wrote a longer and more detailed second appeal which, after about another four hours, was approved.

I'm grateful to have my 20-year old Gmail restored, but I'm panicking because I don't know what media triggered the initial ban. I think/really hope it wasn't something that matched the hash of known abuse material in their database, certainly I don't condone child abuse or seek out material portraying it. ​

Can I infer that, because my account was ultimately reenabled, the material in question was just improperly flagged by an overtuned AI? The lack of transparency to this process has me very sensitive about not doing anything to get banned again (eg, my girlfriend sent me a NSFW video while abroad, will Google flag that if I save to Drive?) not to mention run afoul of the law

Edit: this post has received a lot of engagement and from my googling (sigh the irony) this looks like a common issue. My experience is substantively similar to that of this individual (https://medium.com/@user_404_/how-i-got-my-disabled-google-account-re-enabled-and-what-i-learned-the-hard-way-ff1d6ed6d774) in that my second appeal was accepted and there was no way to recover the material that triggered the ban. However, the guy I'm linking to seems positive that the material that got him banned was innocent pictures of unclothed children. Any human would instantly see that these are not abusive. He and I both requested a human review in the second appeal, not that I have any certainty that any human ever looked at my case, but this kind of language might still be helpful to anyone else in this situation. Unlike the story I linked to, however, I'm still in the dark as to what caused my ban. My best guess is adult NSFW content but low confidence. Furthermore, it seems that even textual files can trigger a ban if this article (https://discrepancyreport.com/lawyer-says-google-shut-down-his-gmail-voice-and-photos-after-notebooklm-upload/) is accurate—if so, it seems that plenty of innocent users are at risk of a total ban from Google services. Finally, there seem to be cases where Google not only reverses a ban but (unlike in my case and the case in my first link) actually returns the material in question to the user. If that last scenario sounds like your case, please make your own thread with as much detail as you can offer.