Asklemmy

First off, it sounds like congratulations are in order! A new life is always cause for celebration! I hope you, your spouse and your new child are doing well.

Short answer to your question: NO! DO NOT SEND ANY SENSITIVE DATA (INCLUDING PHOTOS) VIA ANY PATH, OR SERVICE YOU DO NOT FULLY CONTROL!!!

Long answer: While What'sApp, Meta and the like, are not known to be quite as... proactive as Google in cracking down on child pornography there is the very real risk that any data you send via any service may be scanned via a ML algorithm and flagged. What happens next depends on the particular service. Not sure about WhatsApp, but in the case of Google, once your account is flagged, your entire account is forwarded to Law Enforcement. As you are just sending pictures of your new arrival (Congrats again!), odds are that the officer assigned will take one look at it and clear you. All good, so far, right? Yea, not so much. You might not be going to jail but when Google locks down an account, they do not reactivate it, regardless of what law enforcement might decide, and as they are a private company, suing them to get your accounts reactivated is a lost cause. They are allowed to decide whom they want as a customer so long as their standard is applied evenly and doesn't target certain protected groups.

No service you use should ever be allowed to see anything important to you. Ever.

If you can, I would self host a cloud service like NextCloud out of your own home to share files freely, although an GPG encrypted email would work. Your current email provider is fine, although use a third party email client that supports encryption, like Thunderbird. and much as I like ProtonMail's stance on privacy, I would still use a separate encryption method for anything truly sensitive.

I know I sound like a privacy nutjob, but seriously. When the consequences of a false allegation are that high, you should recognize the threat and act accordingly. I use Google, TikTok, iCloud and others, but if the subject matter is anything much more consequential than the weather, then it doesn't touch their servers. It's not so much paranoia as it is threat mitigation. Google and Apple's services are incredibly useful, but if you depend on them too much, the loss of them could hurt, alot.

Like I said most of the other services don't have quite the reputation for uncalled for lockouts but here are a few news articles I came up with on a quick search:

• https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/03/08/when-google-locks-you-out-of-your-account-begging-the-internet-for-help-is-your-first-and-last-resort/

• https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html (Paywalled)

• https://www.theverge.com/2014/8/5/5970141/how-google-scans-your-gmail-for-child-porn

• https://nypost.com/2022/08/22/google-bans-dad-for-sending-pics-of-toddlers-swollen-genitals-to-doctor/

• https://news.bloomberglaw.com/privacy-and-data-security/google-flagged-child-porn-case-shows-court-split-on-privacy-30 (Paywalled)

• https://bringmethenews.com/minnesota-news/innocent-family-photos-or-child-porn-investigators-face-tricky-case

• https://www.npr.org/2021/08/06/1025402725/apple-iphone-for-child-sexual-abuse-privacy

• https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2022-09-19/google-closed-my-account-over-sexual-content-but-theyre-not-telling-me-what-it-is-and-ive-lost-everything.html

If your interested in learning more about self-hosting services out of you home you might check these out as a starting point:

• https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted (Non-exhaustive list of services)

• https://selfhosted.show/ (Podcast focused of self hosting services)

• https://www.howtogeek.com/846979/heres-why-self-hosting-a-server-is-worth-the-effort/