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Google photos on ios is literally a hostage situation. Remove key functionalities like copying an image or editing an image unless you give them full unrestricted access to your entire photo library. (The holy grail of surveillance capitalism data). Data extortion masquerading as a service.
The irony of complaining about unreasonable requirements from an Apple user isn't lost on me.
I don't know if the format really applies. Complaining about one corporation stealing your data while using another's product that does the same seems a bit pointless, especially when there are cheaper, better alternatives. The putting a stick through your own bike tire format seems more appropriate.
Why even install this crap?!
People don't know. Researching good image backup/sharing options is beyond most normies. Privacy invasion isn't even a known problem for them to care about.
My parents certainly won't be able to comprehend this. My brothers are tech savvy, and it's taken years for them to come onboard with self hosting since I've started advocating it (one still can't because his wife finds it difficult to move away from Google photos).
If you’re on iOS you have to actively install this. So either they or someone else chose this. Plenty of options to move away from Gagle. It’s 2025.
Yeah, iOS is nuts.
Transfer files over bluetooth? Best go buy an entire apple product because fuck internationally recognized standards.
Transfer music to the iPhone? Gotta download one of two programs, make an apple account, and sync your entire library. Apple doesn't support common formats such as FLAC? Go fuck yourself and convert your entire library for them.
Backup your phone to the cloud? Apple doesn't let you select how many backups are saved so you run out of storage and get an upgrade to apple storage program for only $5.99 every other month/phone update.
I thought google was bad with their tyranny of default but the iphone 16 pro max is the pinnacle of anti user and pro consumerism. I list that phone as it is the only apple phone I have used.
I don't think this is an iOS problem, unless the Bluesky post predates the feature that showed me this when I tried to insert a picture in OneNote:
Choosing "Limit Access..." lead to this:
Similar situation with WhatsApp on Android: you can't share images or videos without giving the app full access to your entire filesystem. You also can't video or voice call without giving the app full phone permissions.
Other apps happily let you do all of those things. You can just Share an image from some other app. But nope, WhatsApp just refuses.
I have WhatsApp on Android and have restricted its access to my photos. Every time I want to share an image I need to first select which new photos I want to give Whatsapp access to, then select the photos again to send them. Next time I tap to share an image I won't see any new photos in the options no matter how many new photos are in my gallery.
I can also share to Whatsapp from my gallery, which will prompt again the permission for this individual photo thing. Same.
WhatsApp is awful with permissions. I couldn't find a way to use it without giving it access to all my contacts. I installed it on the work profile and uninstalled it as soon as I didn't need it anymore.
>Uses applications from the most privacy-destroying ad agency in the history of the world
>Is surprised that they don't respect privacy.
Isn’t the point of google photos to back up your entire photo library?
Is this real?
I'm so used to computer-things being files I edit sovereignly on my device that I find it hard to understand the serfware.
I'm so used to computer-things being files I edit sovereignly on my device that I find it hard to understand the serfware.
I like your framing and terminology!
Written black on white in 1998 so nearly 3 decades ago by Hal Ronald Varian, chief economist at Google, chapter 5 Recognizing Lock-In and chapter 6 Managing Lock-In with my own notes https://fabien.benetou.fr/ReadingNotes/InformationRules
Namely it's a strategy. It does not make it "OK" morally or ethically but at least business wise, we had been warned a long long time ago. If despite this been laid out so plainly and methodically we don't both individually and collectively, keep on using such services then we have to at least understand the consequences.
Edit: want to do something about it? Please do. Use https://takeout.google.com/ to leave then bring your own data in a system you actually manage, e.g. https://immich.app/ or whatever else better fit your need. If you still stay, you are giving Google more power to keep on using your data.
Stop using Google trash. Google is evil.
Maybe don’t use services by the worlds largest ad company?
Out of curiosity - are there any companies offering to host Immich for you and provide backups and stuff?
I’m tempted to self host it for my family, but my biggest concern is losing data that I self host (and time spent managing this).
In your situation, Ente would be better. Handling a VPS for Immich is asking for a headache.
Ente supports a family plan, handles hosting and backup for you, supports all your usual media files and imports them cleanly from Google Photos. But it's private, encrypted, and you can take out your data at any time with a single click.
If you use apple images or whatever the fuck it's called then they have the same thing. Unless you do their e2ee thing and hope they don't hold the decryption keys for that.
So happy I went the NAS route for photos solution... sure it costs more and takes some knowledge of how to do it, but it's not its only purpose either.
Another hostage situation here is when migrating from android to apple, you can’t view your old Google photos without giving it access to your Apple photos. I’ve explicitly partitioned those photos and Google doesn’t need access to my new photos to allow me to view my old photos.
that the app has limited functionality without those permissions is scummy, but you should be able to access those photos from another app, Google Photos isn't locking them out of access, right? what's hostage about this?
I'm on Android and turned off all Gemini features on my Google accounts. Now it refuses to let me do reverse image searches, claiming I "don't own" the images I'm trying to reverse search. It looks like (I haven't checked) they want me to upload the images to Drive and give Google permission to access everything again before they'll agree to do a reverse image search for me.
Fortunately, there's still TinEye and Yandex.