Google and Facebook give cops thousands of pictures falsely deemed “child porn.” but kept anyway.

RCMP stores explicit media flagged as child porn, even if it's not, Quebec court case reveals

Montreal lawyer challenging AI reporting of private messages in client's case.
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MONTREAL, CANADA (CBC), August 20, 2025: Google and Facebook AI give cops thousands of pictures deemed “child porn.” 2/3 of them are dismissed as harmless, but kept anyway.

CBC News, RCMP stores explicit media flagged as child porn even if it's not Quebec court case reveals CBC News Montreal August 20 2025

Gabriel Ellison-Scowcroft, reporting for Canada’s state broadcaster, the CBC, tells us about how, 70 per cent of the time, AI employed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), and presumably other police - in Canada and abroad - falsely tags our pictures stored in the cloud (ie Google Photos and Facebook) as “child porn.”

If you took pictures of your kids at the beach, even if you took a picture which happened to include children (fully clothed), the Mounties’ AI is scooping it up and ratting you out. And if you sent one of those pictures as a text message attachment, you've been scooped up in Big Tech's net.

“Tens out thousands” of pictures, according to Mr. Scowcroft, are furnished to the RCMP by Google and Meta (Facebook). And 70 per cent of them are “quickly dismissed.” HOWEVER, those pictures, those “quickly dismissed” not-child-porn pictures, are being kept “for a hundred years” by the cops.

This is the CBC’s report, as posted on August 20, 2025, with additional editorializing by your humble correspondent. Comments in the report by Luc Lefebvre, president of Crypto.Quebec, lawyer Felix Antoine Doyon, and Evan Light, communications professor at the University of Toronto.

B-roll footage of police riots in 1997 in Vancouver and 2022 in Ottawa.

The most tragic thing about the RCMP is, Paul Gross, Leslie Nielsen and Gordon Pinsent were never really mounties. Just as Harrison Ford and James Earl Jones were never really CIA agents here in the United States.