Literal Hostage Situation
Alt Text:
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.
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.
Just because it's super easy and well known I would assume
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 phone
Consider 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.
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.
But if you care about any of that, why the fuck would you use WhatsApp!
Because everyone uses whatsapp. For most there isn't really an option of not using whatsapp. Though more and more people are switching to signal nowadays, which is good to see.
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?
speaking from experience, I could do without 700,000,000 memes saved since 2012 in with sentimental family photos
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!
It is real. Even granting limited access to Google photos will lock down key functionality. I was on Android until just recently with a decade of content I still want to access on an iPhone.
I need to follow these instructions but haven’t made the time for it: https://support.apple.com/en-us/120924
Yup, literally went through it today. When helping my family member with their phone.
Stop using Google trash. Google is evil.
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.
Maybe don’t use services by the worlds largest ad company?
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
That doesn't matter. Why are they using Google products with an iPhone?
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.
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.
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.
https://elest.io/open-source/immich
No experience with them so can't at all vouch for them, but it looks like there are providers who will do this.
I self host Immich with an off site backup (=raspberry pi at in-laws house, all over WireGuard). Can't recommend Immich enough!
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.
my nas save me on cloud storage cost, since i got a tons of pictures and videos, so it pays for itself
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.
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?
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
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.
if you’re not paying for a product, then YOU are the product being monetized.
Not that google isn't capable of epic evil, but have you considered they the might just be completely fucking incompetent at IOS apps :)
No, they have infinite money and are a prestige job for developers. The chances that they were unable to hire talented programmers on the singular most popular smartphone is essentially zero.
Does iOS have per file permissions? I don't think you can blame Google for something the OS can't do.
Yes iOS allows you to tell an app it can only access select photos but idk how google photos works since the built in one is good enough for me. Wouldn’t put it past google to say "all or nothing" tho.
Eh, they provide that level of file access control on their own devices as well. Feels more plausible to me that they just don't put that much development effort into their iOS app.
Putting any significant amount of work into making a photo library management app work with "not the library" on a platform that your software doesn't see a lot of usage on to appeal to a subset of users who want that is the exact sort of thing product managers skip because it's just not a problem to enough people.
Currently working on a better script to import all my Google Takeout images into Immich. If anyone wants to help, I can publish it on GitHub. I’ve currently got it sorting all the photos correctly, and now I need to combine the still and live versions into one photo.
I’m doing this because the current import project doesn’t work well. It goes on basically filename alone, which has a lot of problems with a big complicated library like my own. I’ve used all of iCloud, Google Photos, and Immich at different points and together, so there are tons of duplicate files.
This is a particularly hard problem because Google Takeout names files in the most convoluted way. You might have a photo called Photo1.jpg and a metadata file called Photo1.supplemental-meta.json, which is fine, but then a photo called MeAndTheWifeAtTheBeach(1).jpg and a metadata file called MeAndTheWifeAtTheBeach.supplemental-m(1).json. Then you could also have a live version that doesn’t have its own metadata file. And these might exist in different folders. The current import project doesn’t take any of this into account.
IIRC, Ente has a working Import for Google Takeout correctly joining the Live Photos. Maybe it’s with taking a look at that for some inspiration.
You I can't open the app without giving full access, and the only reason I use it is it's the only way to have a personalised album on the Chromecast. I'm in the progress of degoogling, a Roku hopefully has ethical options
LineageOS has android TV builds, KDE has "Plasma Big screen" and theres a lot of cheap Android TV boxes that can be rooted and have their bloat uninstalled. Raspberry Pi's look like the go to right now, seeing you can get a Pi4 for under $40, and a cheap USB remote off eBay or aliexpress for less than $5
Thank you!! I didn't even consider RPi, and I'll look into LineageOS TV
There was an LTT video last year that recommended a $20 'Onn.' (Walmart store brand) Android TV for its ability to be rooted/hacked. I bought a couple to replace my Roku, but haven't actually gotten around to messing with them yet.
If it hasn't changed/been locked down since then, I think it's a better option than a Raspberry Pi at over twice the price (you forgot the cost of the case and power supply, BTW).
A raspberry pi or mini PC is more useful but the 10 foot interface for streaming services can really suck. Unless you pirate then the world is your oyster.
getting my family off of google is proving to be a years long process but it's going to be worth it and i'm not letting corpo scum fool me again
I've just set up a self hosted server, with lots of useful Docker containers. Any suggestions for a good image host? I saw immich, and it sounds tempting, any thoughts?
Google photos masquerading as service.
There, FTFY 🤌🏼
Don't use Google.
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
I had this back in the day. No phone app. Just browser. Also there is a limit on how many photos it'ss displayed at one time.
I switched to Xpenology. Not sure if it's still the same issues.
People need to get their heads out of the idea that privacy is any kind of rule. It isn't. It's an exception. Unless you personally use a private dns server, unless you personally use a VPN, encrypt your files, use custom roms and open software for interacting with the internet, then you should assume that you're just an open book.
How could they steal and sell my data!?
OF COURSE, they'd steal and sell my data!
Careful, tho. You get hardcore into privacy and security and you'll basically have a side-gig of constantly checking for leaks and reading product reviews for "linux support".
At this point, any time I get downvotes for privacy and security discussions, I'm just going to chock it up to how the willfully ignorant cope with reality.
Google and Apple, every company and government that can, spies on you. Telling them no is not taken seriously. This isn't some kind of slightly unbelievable truth, it's just the way shit is, and has been for over a decade. If you're pissed off about it, do some work on yourself. You're a hypocrite if you're participating in foss, vpn and self governance discussions but scoff at folks like me like we're wearing tinfoil hats. You leave a breadcrumb trail everywhere you go. Believe it or don't.
I’m with you. I’ve noticed that folks on Lemmy get very upset when you try to explain that, broadly speaking, digital privacy is hardly more than theater. Everything you do online is being fingerprinted, watched, cataloged, organized, and tied back to you and the devices you use either directly or indirectly. There are steps you can take to reduce this exposure, which you pointed out, but nothing that fully negates it.
This is because we do not have strong enough laws protecting digital privacy, there are either no penalties or weak penalties for companies violating privacy - even in the most egregious ways - and heaps of money to be made from engaging in such violations.
The majority of the populace just doesn’t seem to care, and this can only change when we’ve achieved widespread awareness and public support.
I'll go one further. If you're on this site and you're not using a VPN, either your own or as a customer of Mullvad or something, that you van verify, hides your dns entries and doesn't leak, then you're a hypocrite, lazy or willfully ignorant.
Like, why are all of you here? If spyware wasn't an issue, go back to Reddit. You can roll your eyes with the rest of the cattle. Adguard home doesn't exist "for funsies". We don't contribute our lives to this shit on a whim. This is cybersecurity, it exists. God, like climate deniers...
That is not what "literally" mean lmao.
Just use FOSS software, nobody's pointing a gun at you. Pretty sure if a real hostage situation survivor reads this s.he will laugh wtf
Of all the metaphorical hyperbole situations where "literally" is misused, this one is barely an offender, and actually quite literal.
Because it's not you that is being held hostage, it is access to functionality and data which are being held hostage at the ransom price of your privacy.
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
Ho is this extortion when your fotos are just there, on your phone?
No. You have to choose to download google photos.
Many people have it because they’ve got no clue about this stuff and google photos is for “free cloud storage” or the “shared family album”.
Oooooh. I understand. Thank you, kind stranger.
Man posting this has three photos of a stump he removed once, 10 photos of a trip to Spain and 3 selfies done by his niece
What if I just don't care, I grew up in the era of sending film off to be developed so I automatically don't take incriminating photos. Nor to I take pictures of secure sensitive information.
When you sent in photos to be developed each one didn't have a time stamp and a precise location. That's the difference.
& device fingerprint & personal (google) account & a ton of metadata linked to both
Could we keep these spaces you speak of free of advertisements?
Bro. This is the fediverse. Don’t crap where you (we) live.
we think about this deeply—not just in terms of digital tools
Eh... if that's genuinely the case, absolutely nothing at all on your link show it. There is no open source repository about the page, all social networks are centralized surveillance-capitalism fueled platform, there is no mention of image or video sharing on e.g. Immich, PeerTube, PixelFed, etc.
You have the potential for something actually great here, and maybe you actually believe in what your are saying, but there is 0 sign of it.
Please do better.
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.
If missing the point was an Olympic sport you'd be a gold medalist.
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.
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.