To be honest, $2/month isn't that unreasonable from a useful service. I would definitely class Google Photos as useful, especially its ability to search for pictures.
I personally use iCloud, and back everything to a Synology.
It is not, however for some of us, there was an implicit “I let you datamine my images, you host them” relationship. Having to pay google tips the scales, so why not spend your $2 on a more privacy oriented service?
Because the people willing to pay Google for their service don't mind the use of their pictures to better their services elsewhere. Google didn't get to be where it was without us , and the fight for privacy isn't worth it for some (most) people. Alternatives usually involve self hosting, trusting a privacy focused service , or not doing it at all. It's tiring. I respect the effort , but In a lot of ways it feels like going backwards.
That is exactly how google wanted it to be. Thy lied made everyone attached to the technology and now milking off it. Moreover I would not like google to invade my privacy if I am paying for it. I am paying and also my privacy is being breached. that doesn't seem fair
The fight for privacy is absolutely worth it. Those people have no idea about what they are getting into, they don't know anything. That is not something to base upon.
You think a random person who would never look or care about tech would understand the privacy issues? Absolutely not. All they'd know is what the companies say and advertise.
I don't agree, especially due to massive media coverage around these issues even my mom who knows nothing about tech is very hesitant to sign up with new services and existing ones changing policies and what not.
Not everyone understands the privacy issues deeply, but they are at least aware and in many cases more careful than say 5 years ago.
What kind of datamining? I suppose we have no way of actually knowing if it's true, but Google does say they don't use Photos data for ads:
As always, we don’t sell your information to anyone, and we don’t use information in apps where you primarily store personal content—such as Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Photos—for advertising purposes, period.
> As always, we don’t sell your information to anyone, and we don’t use information in apps where you primarily store personal content—such as Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Photos—for advertising purposes, period.
As always with privacy policies, the information is in what is NOT said.
1. They don't sell to anyone. But what giving away for free?
2. They don't use personal content for advertising purposes. But what about other purposes than advertising? For example applying face or location recognition in photos to establish a profile that is used in a fraud detection service in Google Pay?
Google, in general, does not sell or give away data. What they do is charge advertisers to target ads to users based on that data.
The distinction is that 3rd parties only have access to Google UIs or APIs based around ad targeting selectors. There is no API for 3rd parties to just download raw user data from Google.
This is in contrast to Facebook, which used to allow “apps” on their platform to suck down raw user profile data in large quantities.
It seems very likely that Google is using their user data for non-ad purposes, for example using Google Photos data to train ML image recognition engines, or using Gmail data to train conversational AI systems.
1) I trust them when they say they don't sell it, technically.
However they probably do sell information/meta data they themselves have mined from my data, which they probably claim is harmless and de-personalized.
I love being able to search random things like "Honda" or "waffles" to find pictures from years ago in a few seconds. I use it often now that I can do it
I'm not the GP but what I do is all my camera devices will sync to a cloud drive, and my NAS then syncs the cloud drive. Google Photos seems to be able to see them. That way I always have two copies of the image, a cloud version and a local.
The main failure mode I'm concerned about is if Google decides I'm no longer worthy of an account. In that case I'll still have my pics and I'll put in the effort to set up some other service.
I'm unsure how to do it with iPhoto. My guess is it syncs up to Apple cloud, from which the NAS should be able to sync? At least once it's off the phone you don't have the sandbox, which is a bit stronger on Apple devices, IIRC.
My cameras are all Androids, so I use FolderSync to put things in the cloud. It being Android there's still a filesystem that it can scan. I use an app on my QNAP to bring them back home.
I've been using icloud-photos-downloader[0] for a while now, running as a Scheduled Task on my Synology. It supports 2FA as well, I just have to re-auth every 3-4 months.
I'm fine my photos are managed by Google, so I signed up 100GB plan of Google One. Google Opinion Rewards provides me enough money to fulfill the annual fee.
I'm in Japan. I sometimes (about 30%) receive survey about payment method after I visit random store in a day. It uses my location history. Rewards are about 10-50JPY (about 9-45c) each.
I personally use iCloud, and back everything to a Synology.