Im not sure it's damning to google as much as to the rest of the internet.

It's indexed by Google; somebody else hosted it publicly

Broad swaths of behavior by the spying tech giants just needs to be outlawed. Discussions about how to mitigate the harm aren't going to fix much. The harmful behavior should be outright banned. "Google and Facebook just have to creepily spy on people, force some workers to look at horrible images, et c., to operate". OK, cool—sounds like they shouldn't operate, then, if that's true.

To privacy or not to privacy is not the question; the question is privacy for whom.

Google indexes the public internet. If its indexed on google it was uploaded, likely by the minor in question not having set their privacy settings on their Facebook.

Google is doing more than they should have to here.

Why is it damning? It’s not obvious to me, apologies.

I'm not the guy you're asking but what jumped out to me is that this change creates a database of images of minors and the damning/ironic part is that these are images of people who don't want to be easily searchable to begin with. Imagine the damage if this somehow leaks.

If my wording above sounds convoluted then let me paraphrase: a blacklist is a database too. Google's blacklist will contain assured images of minors because the minors/guardians reported them as such.

Sure it can be hashed/MLed/Bloomfiltered instead of a tabular listing but someone with enough patience and resources can probably make something out of it. (To be honest I don't want to peddle FUD and I'm speaking out of my depth here so I'd be glad to hear an assessment from someone with qualified experience in this area.)

This would be greatly alleviated if everyone was allowed to remove their images in search. I can't help but think it would help https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28216733 .

So what do you think the solution is? Given that these images are already on the web anyway for people to see.