Older people (seen it at 65+) will just click the nag without knowing what the button does and end up beaming up all photos to google cloud with no ability to disable the nag (it keeps showing up after a while) even when dismissed. If you are concerned about your data privacy, you may want to check on what photos of say your kids your parents are beaming up to google without their or your knowledge.
It is worse than that. It fills up your accounts cloud storage, where your Google docs, sheets, drive files etc are stored.
Once full you are caught in their trap: pay a monthly fee to the mafia or delete your data!
This flow is intentional and they have set up everything to bring you there. The Photo-Backup popup (and arguably the whole photo feature) helps to shovel users more quickly to the end of the monetization funnel.
It’s even worse than that! There is no delete all feature! So if you have 100k photos and make the mistake of saying yes to Google Photos just once, it will fill up all your storage space, block your email until you pay for extra storage, then force you to delete all your photos manually, one page at a time, before you can stop using it. I think that trap is the sleaziest thing I’ve seen Google do.
They actually did build a way to undo enabling backup that removed all the photos added from the enabled device. I guess that's a tacit acknowledgement that people are likely to enable this accidentally.
I remember there being a mini scandal about this feature being limited to 3 uses or something, but can't seem to find the story right now.
This was even more annoying when they started including whatsapp backups in your quota and sent a load of people over quota. And as far as I know there's no alternative for whatsapp backups apart from plugging in a USB cable and hoping Whatsapp don't change the method between now and when you need to restore it
It is possible to back up the WhatsApp folder if using Android, with the likes of total commander or any other file browser.
It can then be decrypted with a simple access to the _sim card_, i.e. a way to receive a message, meaning that anything backed up to Google drive should not considered safe from a dedicated state actor (even if the other party did it). It is quite easy to demonstrate with a new phone or an emulator.
I have doubts on how much the US gov needs to break the Whisper protocol when they have such easy to get side attacks.
I was under the impression that to backup the encrypted whatsapp you need to enable your own encryption key, which presumably makes it more secure but of course that's trusting Meta's implementation
The Whatsapp's restore process if you're not on Google Drive is unreliable too. I keep a separate backup but also have to keep the Google Drive backup on because it's too risky now I've seen it fail to restore and was only able to rescue it using the Google Drive backup I had also. If it just had my backup I'd have lost the lot.
Are Google Photos stored in Google Drive? Because Google Collab has access to Google Drive so you can write some nifty Python scripts to move your data between Drive accounts and do mass renames/deletes etc.
No, I've never seen Google Photos reflected in any Google Drive interface (web, OS integration, etc.) which on the one hand makes sense (think of Google Photos more like a database-driven black box app than a hierarchical filesystem) but on the other hand Google Drive does show gdocs, gsheets, etc. (which is also sort of a black box app, as the "files" seen in GDrive are merely lightweight stubs).
Only in storage quota views do Photos and Drive (and Gmail, etc.) commingle.
I guess the hopeful one, "Google always kills its products", suggesting that the bad product in this thread is also doomed. I hold this same hope, almost entirely unironically, about so many things.
I've said "no" to this popup at least 100 times. Under what notion of obtaining consent would it be considered acceptable to ask me again the 101st time?
I've never once cleared the cache on this app, and you can trivially find hundreds of other people complaining about this same behavior. Why make such an assumption and write it in such an insulting style?
Please don't let it become acceptable to be yelled in the face every few minutes of the day by ads, commercials, notifications and other attacks on our perpetually overstimulated brains, most of which we have no control over at all.
To have a healthy relationship with technology requires holding manufacturers and service providers responsible for our mental health.
It's also not hard to just connect your phone to your laptop, copy your photos off every month or so, and clear the phone storage. I actually can't believe this isn't the normal way people do things. People pay to let Google keep copies of all their photos?! And I mean, setting up your own self-hosted storage for all your photos is neat and stuff, but seriously, seems like overkill. One folder a year on my laptop / backup drive is sufficient for me. I've got "photos_1998" all the way up to "photos_2016". It's a useful test to see if I remember the order of events in my life, when or if I go looking for something.
>connect your phone to your laptop, copy your photos off every month or so, and clear the phone storage. I actually can't believe this isn't the normal way people do things. People pay to let Google keep copies of all their photos?! And I mean, setting up your own self-hosted storage for all your photos is neat and stuff, but seriously, seems like overkill. One folder a year on my laptop / backup drive is sufficient for me.
Your suggested alternative of moving all photos to a laptop doesn't work for the people who prefer having all their photos accessible from their smartphone. That's the usable UI that the constant sync to cloud services gives them. The tradeoff is the cloud storage subsciption costs.
Also, transferring all photos to a laptop creates a single-point-of-failure if the laptop dies. Recovering photos becomes even more complicated when the internal SSD is encrypted with macOS File Vault or Windows BitLocker. Yes, photos in cloud storage isn't really a "true backup" in the 3-2-1 best practices sense but it's still more durable against catastrophic data loss than a single laptop.
The self-hosted Immich photo server is just one way to enable smartphone access to all photos and avoid paying for cloud storage. That's the reward for the "overkill" setup.
Fair enough, I guess if you want access to your entire lifetime photo collection through your phone that makes sense. As far as backups - I mean, that's just a general question of keeping your laptop backed up. I use Arq (highly recommended!) to maintain a remote encrypted backup on a VPS, along with Time Machine to an external SSD.
I hate Google and their dark patterns as much as the next guy but I agree: Having the pop-up once or twice or even three times is reasonable. A lot of people value the backup more than their privacy.
But after saying no three times, it really ought to leave the user alone...
storing important files with google is risky business anyway. you could lose them for any other stupid reason, and im sure there is nothing you can do but blame yourself for trusting them.
