Privacy

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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital 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

114 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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[–] fluckx@lemmy.world 1 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (1 children)

I just checked,

google photos has permanent access to photos and videos. If you disable the app the camera roll no longer works. I get "activity not found".

Maybe with a FOSS camera app it might still work? I haven't tried.

Edit: and that is the only permission which it has ( photos and videos ). Everything else ( location, contacts, ... ) is not allowed. But that one permission is auto permanently allowed.

[–] quick_snail@feddit.nl 1 points 20 hours ago

Just don't install gapps. Its missing by default when you install the OS..