I'm surprised at how long this has gone on, but not at all surprised that it happened. Based on my experience at Google, I would have expected the NYT article to get it unstuck within 2-3 days.

When I was at Google, I was continuously amazed at how hard it was to stop this kind of own-goal when we knew it was happening. (Based on where I was inside Google, I came across (dramatically-less-sensational) obviously dumb decisions of this sort).

It was always shockingly hard as a Googler to get traction on fixing some customer's bureaucracy-navigation problem -- but usually it getting into the press finally got someone through the bureaucracy.

My (somewhat cynical) explanation is that they want to deter people from taking these types of medical pictures on their phones, since that makes Google's job easier.

Rather than improve their AI to avoid more of these types of false positives, or invest in their customer support teams to deal with these situations, they can eliminate this entire class of false positives by scaring people with articles like this.

EDIT: which if true, is kind of extra fucked up when you consider the potential consequences of delaying medical treatment for a child.

I’m right there with you in dismay, but I think this has been building up a while: consider how long there have been Google employees who browse HN, fully aware of how broken processes are damaging users and developers, and just sitting on the sidelines because they’re in it for the paycheck.