Privacy

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Google Photos app uploaded all my locally saved pictures completely against my will (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 day ago by RealM__@lemmy.world to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

124 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I've gotten a new phone and setting it up for the past few days - a Fairphone 5 with Android installed. So obviously, this means I can't escape Googles clutches. Sure, whatever.

I have been VERY adamant about pressing "No" on all prompts, that try to get me to try something out or use some dumb service. I do not want any AI tool or similar to go through my files.

Yet, while perousing the depths of my system settings, I realized Google Photos was using a suspicous amount of storage. Somehow, it had "synchronized" ALL my locally saved pictures - this included pictures of my vacations, my drivers license, private pictures I would have rather not shared, and so on...

And while checking the Google Photos App for the damage done, obviously it had already automatically generated "previews" and "albums" for me, neatly organized.

IT HAD AUTOMATICALLY ANALYSED MY DRIVERS LICENSE AND SAVED IT INTO AN ALBUM CALLED "Identity-related"

How the fuck is this legal? I am so mad at myself right now. I'm usually so fuckin cautious about denying any sort of pop-up and setting all settings as strictly as possible.

So obviously I just had to spent 2 hours figuring out how to turn this "synchronization" off, and how to delete all photos in google photos - spoiler alert: There is no "Delete All" button. You have to manually select every single fucking image.

Sorry for the rant, I hope it's not too off-topic. I'm just so mad right now.

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[–] nutbutter@discuss.tchncs.de 27 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

There was a news some time ago, that a man was arrested for clicking nude pictures of children, later it was found out that he was sending pictures of his child to a doctor for diagnosis. How did that happen?

I'll link the source if I find it.

Update:

NYTimes - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html

Paywall removed - https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html

[–] sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 2 hours ago

A Google spokeswoman said the company stands by its decisions, even though law enforcement cleared the two men.

They are literally too big to care.

[–] pineapple@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 day ago

I've heard about this too.

[–] webghost0101@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 day ago (2 children)

That must be some other system indeed.

They don't really provide much information from how the images were actually shared though.

Maybe there is a machine learning algorithm that is trained to detect specific features in a random photo but i cant imagine it being accurate without frequent false possibles.

Could be that if you have a certain amount of “plausible” hits then a google employee has to review them manually and they quickly Judged it wrongly?

Though that technically implies your Private medical picture is now seen and possibly covertly copied by a (rogue) employee.

[–] witness_me@lemmy.ml 2 points 22 hours ago

It’s been well documented.

False positives don’t matter, and there’s no human to talk to when it occurs.

[–] quick_snail@feddit.nl 2 points 1 day ago

They don't manually review. They just shutdown your account and you can't contact them. See my other comment