Temporary Injunction Against Google Over Account Suspension

On April 14, 2026, the National Federal Court on Civil and Commercial Matters 2 of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires partially granted a temporary injunction in the case "L.A. y otros c/ Google LLC s/ Daños y Perjuicios" and ordered Google LLC to restore access to the Gmail and Google Drive accounts of a judge of the Criminal Court of Appeals of the Province of Tierra del Fuego, which the company had suspended in April 2025.

The suspension was triggered when Google's automated child sexual abuse material (CSAM) detection system identified images stored in the judge's account through cryptographic hash value matching.The judge had transferred work files to his personal Google Drive account—a practice encouraged by Disposition 130/23 of the Province's Superior Court of Justice—and among them were images from a criminal case involving sexual offenses against minors that he had handled in 2016, which had been automatically stored on his institutional computer without his knowledge. Once triggered, the detection mechanism led Google to suspend the account and report the finding to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), classifying the user's conduct as "malicious." Based on that report, the NCMEC forwarded the information to the Specialized Cybercrime Prosecutor's Office of Buenos Aires, which led to the opening of criminal proceedings in Tierra del Fuego. On October 13, 2025, the Criminal Chamber of the Southern Judicial District of that Province issued a full and final dismissal of all charges against the judge, which became final.

In assessing the likelihood of success on the merits, judge Marcelo Bruno Dos Santos gave significant weight to the final acquittal, which established that the images had a legitimate judicial origin and that the judge was unaware of their presence in the digital backup. In this context, the Court noted that information available on Google's own platform at the time of the report—the formal rebuttals submitted by the plaintiff, the formal legal notice sent to Google Argentina, and the 2016 judicial record identifying the material by the same hash value—did not appear to have been adequately considered. The Court held that compliance with the reporting obligation under US federal law (18 USC § 2258C) and the company's zero-tolerance policy on CSAM did not constitute, at this preliminary stage, a bar to granting the temporary injunction. As for the urgency requirement, the Court noted that the judge holds active judicial duties and that the provincial judiciary promotes the use of such platforms for remote work, making the continued deprivation of access an ongoing and growing harm.

The temporary injunction was granted with the explicit limitation that the reinstatement should not extend to the material identified as CSAM in the report, which must remain inaccessible for the duration of the proceedings. The Court also ordered Google to preserve all documents and files linked to the account until a final judgment is issued, under penalty of daily fines for non-compliance. The Court denied, however, the non-modification injunction that sought to prevent any future changes to the provision of services, finding it excessively broad.