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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.
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I dont know that google even is the most convenient product for this anymore. The experience via google, microsoft, and amazon have all gotten so shitty that normal people I know are complaining about it.
I’m still pissed over them nuking my violent money scripts. Maybe this is a bad idea but I migrated to using a chromebook after years of using a linux laptop. Everything I do is on server so I just need the most mobile device possible that can hop on SSH. Every browser available on it besides chrome wastes screen real estate. Otherwise I wouldn’t be caught dead using chrome.
Well they blocked my violent monkey at there goes a lot of custom scripts. Because ChromeOS is so locked down I can’t exfiltrate the extension data and get it by other means. Fuck them destroying other people’s data with an update. They could have at least let people run manifest V2 extension’s own internal pages and blocked them running on websites if they don’t want V2 extensions interacting with their precious ad network.
I’m now convinced letting corporations into open source was a mistake. Google has needed the open source community to keep their browser highly accepted. But everyone who contributed to a corporate backed open source product basically helped develop and maintain product for a corporation for free.
Then you have IBM I mean Redhat I mean Fedora I mean Free Desktop Foundation intentionally killing XOrg. I know some people here may not like the XLibre fork because of preference for one side or the other in some dev drama but you have to admit it’s kind of a fucked thing that that org chain can cherry pick open source projects to die when they think other software is better for their profit calculation, even when there are people willing to contribute. Maybe IBM shouldn’t be able to do that.
Then you have Microsoft backing what was supposed to be an open source AI project. And look how open source that stayed.
I suppose if corporations want to contribute to open source that’s OK. We’ll take code. But stop letting them lead it.
Here am I, Gigachad, running LineageOS, PiHole and only using FOSS apps
Yeah, I’ve set up an Immich server last week using an old spare 250gb HDD and transfered my google photos to it…so far so good. I had been using nextcloud for a year to new pictures but the UI is not that great and I missed my old photos. Immich is great! Oh I’m also using lineage…with microg, a pihole and some obter awesome self hosting programs
So are you rolling your own cloud storage?
I am running Syncthing between my devices, which is enough for me. I wondered if I should in a Synology, but now that they went full enshittification that’s not a question anymore.
I’m running gos on a pixel and rolling my own cloud with nextcloud on my server. Works great.
I’ll look into nextcloud. What kind of hardware are you running it on? Any type of off-site backups?
I’m running it on a nearly decade old PC I used to use for windows and gaming back in the day. Before I ran it on the PC I ran it for several years on a raspberry pi 4 (8GB).
For offsite, I roll my own by keeping an (encrypted) hard drive stashed in my desk at work. I update it every couple weeks or so, which is fine for me.
Edit to add the PC is now running Ubuntu server, and in addition to nextcloud I run like 15 or so other services for myself and my family like
Navidrome (rips of all my old CDs and new ones I buy) Jellyfin (rips of all our DVDs) Radicale (caldav for calendar. Could do this with nextcloud but I wasn’t running it for a bit there) Joplin server for my notes Mealie for our recipes Forgejo, my private gitforge
There’s more but I can’t think of them.
Man those are some great name drops, thank you. I literally have an outlined plan to write my own Mealie equivalent because I couldn’t find anything that fit without selling me some bs service
By the way, where do you go to find these types of things anymore? Web search has been completely fubar for years
Yeah. Web search sucks these days. Here’s where I find stuff:
Awesome Self Hosted is a list of all kinds of self hosted options broken down into categories. It’s a great resource. I browse this pretty regularly to see if anything catches my eye.
The selfh.st email newsletter is also great. Weekly email with some self hosting news, new projects and projects that have updated.
And the Lemmy communities!
This is the reason FOSS has such a bad name, people will say shit like this as if what they’re doing is easy.
I guess if I won the lottery and didn’t have a job I could spend all that time and money to maintain all that shit.
I have a full time job and am working poor like many. I’m hosting all this on a decade old PC that I built back in the day. I find the time I spend on deploying and maintainig my services very rewarding, but its not for everyone, and that’s fine.
I’ve been at it for years. It takes time and effort and learning to do, and I’ll be the first to help people who post questions here to Lemmy for self hosting.
FOSS is a community like any other with good and bad apples in it. You can learn a ton from the community and take control of your own data if you want to.
I find it very rewarding and fun, but if you expect me to write a full how to every time I mention that I self host that’s a little crazy. I’ll happily answer anyone’s questions and share my knowledge but I’m not just gonna dump six-ish years of my notes in a comment.
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:
So yes. Both apple and Google are doing this shit. It’s very bad at this point.
I’m genuinely considering getting Huawei with harmonyos as my next phoneConsider Huawei has a lot of adware, like Xiaomi.
And you think it will be different? They are all doing this, because your data and info is valuable to them. Who they share the info with might differ, but they are all designed to scrape the data of your life so they can get all the seedy details and use them for whatever the hell they use it for?! Lord only knows why they want to know what I jerk off to, but that’s their problem.
I just don’t connect my phone to the internet. £4 a month for unlimited calls/SMS and that is it. Currently using a brick phone but thinking of replacing it as despite being IP68 water resistant including salt water and bleach, the mic has gone a bit shit after I cleaned it in the sink after it got a few splashes of sea water on it.
When I do get round to replacing it I am looking at the cheapest android I can find, send a few APKs to it over LAN. May let it connect to the internet once to download offline maps.
Probably buying used will get you a better deal
Yeah that is what I am thinking of doing
Who do you think you are ? You’re just extension of their machine. It’s their photos.
And their cameras. I can’t even use my nest camera anymore. Because once Google took over they requested 24/7 access to my living room camera. That’s an absurd ask. Not while it’s on, but 24/7. Fuck you Google. Keep your grimey paws off my data
Am now shopping for home camera system with external hard drive
Don’t use Google.
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.
I wanted to forward my calls based on a schedule. Like forward my calls after 4pm to this number. Nope, can’t do it. It’s an easy thing but no, i need to buy a separate app that allows that function
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.
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.
What are the cheaper better alternatives? I would really love to have a phone that works with most modern things, is private and not by a big corpo, but as far I can tell, it doesn’t exist.
If Fairphone and Pine both don’t meet your needs, then you can install a new OS on basically any android, though pixels work best. Even just getting root access to the phone opens up a ton of options for customization. There are communities on Lemmy that are all about this exact issue, though I don’t know them off the top of my head.
The pinephone isn’t a realistic option. Great in theory but in practice it doesn’t really work in the real world where I unfortunately need WhatsApp to talk to a bunch of people.
Fairphone (or giving google my money to then install graphene) have the same problem — I either give up banking apps and contactless payments; or I have to give into the data hoard that is play services to gain access to those things.
I’m not saying apple is the hero here. I’m saying in a world where people actually need a smartphone to do a lot of things, it’s a better starting off point if you want to get some privacy (not storing photos in iCloud, etc) while retaining normal functionality.
I can see infer the telemetry my phone is sending (monitoring dns requests in pihole) and it’s miles better than any android (non degoogled) that comes in the house.
I also am in the real world. I don’t need banking apps on my phone. WhatsApp is a terrible choice, so inwouldn’t use it. You don’t need these things you want these things.
How many people have you converted over to signal? I’ve done a whole 6. And before you say SMS, only if you live in a country where RCS is a thing, since group chats are a thing. I can do a lot, but it’s irrelevant if other people around me don’t.
Anyone that claims Apple is stealing their data is drastically misinformed to the point where it feels like a rationalization.
Google does it, Facebook does it, Apple does not. Ask any engineer who works at these companies and they can confirm it.
It is frustrating to Apple engineers with how heavily restricted user data is. There are literally committees at Apple who default to No for any request. They do not profit off your data, they profit off the mark up on hardware and services.
Thinking it’s a both/all sides thing is how much be enabled bad actors. The GOP is an example and anyone who falls for the corporate version is no smarter than anyone who falls for the political version. Luckily, it’s not a lonely place to be.
Common sense is no longer common. Feelings have trumped all logic on the majority of Americans as well as the world population at large.
Ask any engineer who works at these companies and they can confirm it.
Yeah ask the engineers who work for a company who’s whole schtick is to pretend to be privacy friendly that it does not steal user data. They’ll definitely tell us.
There are literally committees at Apple who default to No for any request.
Yeah well, Facebook had an ethics committee too, so they’ve always been ethical then huh?
But but but Apple is different…
Anyone who claims these companies have users best interest at heart are gullible people at best or a cult.
you need more of that “common sense” than using your feelings to dictate what multi billion companies are doing with your data.
Anyone who claims these companies have users best interest at heart are gullible people at best or a cult.
Yeah of course, they would be very wrong about that.
However, that doesn’t preclude a company from doing a good thing if they think that is what will make them the most money. If Apple’s giant marketing and product apparatus is going through the effort of selling privacy features, then that absolutely tells us they believe their customers care about it, and it suggests it probably goes into their design process. Maybe.
Apple sells walled-garden integration and privacy, but they do not sell openness and interoperability at all. In contrast, Google sells openness and interoperability, but not so much privacy.
Apple makes their money from hardware sales while Google makes their money from advertising. Again it’s consistent, smaller numbers of higher revenue users versus sheer scale.
I don’t trust either of these companies. Admittedly I do have some products from each still in my life that I’m phasing out, while I use a linux PC for most things. But when it comes to Apple in particular, I have to question how many “hurr durr sent from my iphone” jabs are sent from privacy-invading android phones that have multiple giant corporations’ tentacles in their firmware.
Note that given that this is Lemmy, I assume the proportion of comments posted from primarily FOSS devices is 1000x higher than for other sites/apps, I assume many of those comments are from privacy-respecting devices!
Apple absolutely does collect personal data from its users and uses that data to target advertising. They openly disclose this in their policy statements.
Stating that
They do not profit off your data
is unjustifiable when Apple makes BILLIONS from advertising.
They also have been fined by European regulators when their practices ran afoul of privacy law.
Just because they’re not as bad as Google (quite a low bar) it doesn’t mean they’re as good as they try to sell you on.
Lesser evil is still lesser evil.
It’s hilarious how the people who choose more evil have such hatred of the lesser evils, it’s like the evil has invaded their monds.
That is absolute bullshit. I worked for Apple, training Siri. Through false positive we heard unsuspecting people having sex and dealing drugs while their real names and addresses were on the screen.
https://gizmodo.com/apple-agrees-to-95-million-settlement-in-siri-eavesdropping-lawsuit-2000544806
You’re wrong about that, you’re wrong about politics, and you made voting for a genocider your entire personnality. It’s pretty sad really
Siri has always been a mess. That’s not the data this thread is about.
Photos, got any anecdotal bullshit on that?
You’re an apple idiot aren’t you? Look it’s ok to admit you’ve been dumb as fuck overpaying all these years. We all make mistakes. Think about how scientologists feels.
Lmao I’ve witnessed literal sex cults that were less cultish than an apple campus.
Insulting the person in a internet discussion is an immediate loss.
Keep those emotions in check, it makes you look a fool.
What kind of moving goalpost is this? “Apple does not harvest your data”. “Uh they absolutely do, they literally (used correctly this time) got caught listening to people” “Nu-uh only pictures”.
Won’t someone think of the trillion dollar corporation?
These are the logical fallacies I love to see. Keep justifying shovelling all your data into Google, you’ll show them!
Ah yes, “logical fallacies”, the internet dork’s favorite counter argument.
Google and Apple are both Trillion dollar companies, both are a problem.
Yeah, my bad. I must have replied to the wrong comment there. Your’s was too trite to be worth a reply.
…Apple does not.
Become a security research and they will
If missing the point was an Olympic sport you’d be a gold medalist.
What’s the point? criticising me for complaining about an issue that is on my grandma’s phone that I encountered?
Like yes we get apple is shit, so is android. My grandma is 90 and not loaded with cash I can’t just put her on graphene os.
This is a real way she’s having her data mined. Because other parts of the family insist on using google photos for the “family album”.
The what did you expect with apple as if everyone is a tech savy person with enough free time to maintain a custom rom and money to just straight up buy a new phone when they learn there’s isn’t perfect just ends up dismissing valid criticism.
Couple things here
You made a criticism, other people are allowed to criticize what you said.
Using the excuse of “not loaded with cash” is one I’m confused about. New or used, Pixels (Or some Motos if the Pixel is not available in your country) are cheaper than iPhones.
You seem tech savy enough to use Fedi/Lemmy, why not help them transition to a better solution for their privacy by either buying an ente subscription where they manage hosting and you dont have to worry about that, or using (free) Immich which you have to host yourself but is well worth setting up. You can even import all of your google photos albums and photos 1:1 into Immich as they are on GPhotos.
It is valid to criticize apple. They are a company who likes to taught “privacy” when they are not any better than any other phone manufacturer, no one has denied this. You just seem to find it impossible to be able to criticize both Apple, and consumers who seem to know better (You seem to be aware of Custom ROMs, as you brought it up first).
No one is trying to attack you or your family here. The OP commentor made a joke out of an observation. A valid obervation, as why would you expect Apple or Google to take your privacy in consideration. Yes, it sucks. Yes, it should change, but that change is not going to come from continuing to get fucked by them. You dont need a custom ROM to use Immich or ente. You dont have to allow companies to fuck you. The longer you let them, the harder it is to get out.
Also personal tangent, theres no “maintaining a custom ROM” unless youre building your own ROM. Most recommended custom ROMs auto-update, and dont need any more “maintainence” than an iPhone or stock android.
Did we just compare buying a certain brand of phone to being a serf? Really? No nuance with you people. Because a person being forced to work the fields to live is the same as you having to buy an iPhone.
Did we just compare buying a certain brand of phone to being a serf? Really?
The answer to this strawman of yours is “no” though.
No, I don’t think we did. You seem to be missing the point. The comic is expressing a concept, it is not comparing owning a phone with owning a car or with being a serf.
Technically it’s Foxconn that pays their wages and taxes. The comic obviously has a point though. Minus the Fairphone (overpriced for its spec and likely going to get shorter software support than any iPhone since the 5 it 5S), the options are all shit and include some form of modern slavery. IPhones just get the most attention while Samsung literally runs a country. We can’t just all stop owning modern electronical devices altogether.
Use Immich.
Hey I just set up Immich about 20 minutes ago! All you lazy dweebs (self inclusive) tteck’s community proxmox scripts just pushed an LXC script for immich with all the PITA hardware accel config mostly taken care of
>Uses applications from the most privacy-destroying ad agency in the history of the world
>Is surprised that they don’t respect privacy.
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.
What other option is there for automatic backups, image editing and touchups, and index and searching for photos?
This is a dupe from above btw. I just added this in an edit for clarity. I’m asking the same question of both.
What other option is there for automatic backups, image editing and touchups, and index and searching for photos?
Immich and Gimp. There are tons of alternatives but people don’t bother, expecting something at least as good and as “cheap”. That’s a losing mindset.
We have to use and contribute, paying or not, to actual alternatives even though they are not 100% equivalent otherwise incumbent keep on imposing their rules.
Stopped reading at gimp. GTFO 🤣
Just clueless nerds everywhere expecting people wanting to deal with editing hundreds of photos. Get a clue.
Blocked. I don’t need this kind of low quality interactions, even less while genuinely trying to help others.
The basic photos app on iOS does all that on device
They follow the same privacy standards as Google in the USA. Sure they don’t sell ads but the real issue imo is warrantless requests for that info for the government.
You can literally disable iCloud and still use it all. No privacy standards will matter, it’ll stay in your device.
That’s not what I want. I want it infexed and searchable, backed up, and easily shareable.
It is indexed and searchable locally, you can share with the share button to anywhere you like.
It just won’t be backed up to iCloud.
I’m currently in the process of learning to set up Immich on a home server. That will take care of automatic backup and indexing and searching. My family won’t engage to use this though, so they’re still going to send me Google photos links for sharing.
For touchups, I do that on device with an image editing app it needed. Although I never need to edit really.
By indexing is that by fine name and meta data or does it do face and location matching like Google. I know I’m moving goalposts but that’s the real killer feature IMO.
It’s meant to have facial recognition, etc with a locally run AI
Interesting I’ll check it out.
Just because it’s super easy and well known I would assume
Easy way to backup your photos, create shared albums and it has nice “this time year ago” memories stuff.
Just like the standard app. Again, no added benefit.
And do your friends who use Android use the standard app too?
We’re talking Google photos on iOS
And that also works and is used by people on Android. But you said the “standard app” is a good alternative on iOS but do people on Android use it, so you can actually benefit from shared albums and such?
What other option is there for automatic backups, image editing and touchups, and index and searching for photos?
The standard iOS app?
They follow the same privacy standards as Google in the USA. Sure they don’t sell ads but the real issue imo is warrantless requests for that info for the government.
Apple does keep the photos and metadata encrypted in flight and at rest which I would assume is better than what Google does, but I haven’t seen Google’s policy in a while. Apple Photos Legal Page
deleted by creator
Stop using Google trash. Google is evil.
Isn’t the point of google photos to back up your entire photo library?
speaking from experience, I could do without 700,000,000 memes saved since 2012 in with sentimental family photos
So do you want to give Google Photos access to only specific folders or something?
I think the use case of google photos is to just back up all your photos. If you want something more granular, you probably need a different app.
I mean I dont want to give Google photos access to any of my files, Ive since left their platform behind and switched to something more private. I feel like at one point on Android you could pick and choose which folders got backed up, but thats memories from like, Android 8 so im not positive about that.
Pretty sure you can select the folders in google photos too
Ah, but if you run out of space in your backup, you might think “I’ll just delete some of those photos from my backup”.
And then you go back to your device to find it’s deleted them there too!
I see that. But this is more of a use case issue than a google photos has too much permissions issue.
If you want to delete a photo you need full permissions to that photo.
That’s what you get for using a Google product.
This is actually an iOS issue, their permissions aren’t fine-grained enough so every photo app would need access to the whole photo library. The reason people don’t notice this is because Apple Photos has access by default
You can give permission for the whole library, or any amount of photos you want. How can this be an iOS issue? It’s pretty obvious Google just wants access to your entire library when it isn’t necessary.
That doesn’t matter. Why are they using Google products with an iPhone?
User choice, they shouldn’t be required to use Apple products
They are not required to use Google products, so why throw that in the mix? I mean if they make that choice they are going to get what the get. Nobody is making them do that.
Apple and giving their own software priviledged access and denying/revoking that priveledge from their competitors. Name a more iconic duo. See also Tile, Pebble, Spotify, etc.
Name a more iconic duo:
Google & Spyware
