Google photos backup privacy full#
Google photos backup privacy free#

The language used on this dashboard is couched to suggest Google’s data gathering activities are performed principally for the user’s benefit. Which is a pitch-perfectly disingenuous response to growing consumer concerns about data privacy. It’s interesting the company feels the need to spin so hard on privacy. Today Google also went on a propaganda offensive by launching a centralized ‘privacy dashboard’ that seeks to sanitize the extent and ambition of its data-gathering activities, while also claiming to offer users easier access to some privacy settings (such as the ability to edit or purge the history of videos you’ve watched on YouTube). And the price of its ‘free’ unlimited storage? You giving Google unfettered access to every vista (and its associated metadata) on your camera roll.

Google photos backup privacy free#

There’s no doubt Google Photos is a massive landgrab for personal data - at a time when visual imagery is the biggest social currency of the web. Just as, a decade+ ago, Google launched its own webmail product with significantly more storage as the carrot to peel users away from rival email products, it’s now repeating the trick with photos - using the competitor-beating promise of free unlimited photo storage to lure in and lock down access to mobile users’ principle expression stream. Truly a treasure trove of personal data for its algorithms to ingest and feed into its ad-targeting machinery. And photo time-stamps give further signals the company can data mine for intel on your passions and preoccupations. Its algorithms are even smart enough to geotag images based on stuff they recognize in the shots - like landmarks - so even if you’ve turned off that type of location-stamping in your phone’s camera setting, Google can still work out some of where you’ve been based on what its algorithms can pull out of your photos. Should you really want to.Īnd just as you can trivially navigate and review your visual history using this tool, so too can Google.

Google has even dolled up these underlying data-mining smarts as another consumer lure: Google Photos’ computer vision-powered image search lets people mine their personal photo repository via natural language queries, doing away with the tedium of having to tag stuff. So now you can query your personal photo bank to find every picture of a craft beer bottle you’ve ever snapped, or all the meals you’ve ever photographed, or each and every selfie you’ve ever taken. Its algorithms don’t just see your photos as a random collection of pixels, of course. After all, the unloved Google+ was just acting as bottleneck on what could be a(nother) very sizable personal data funnel for Google’s business.

And how better to get its hands on all that personal content than by encouraging people to upload it themselves to a free storage repository. Oodles and oodles of personal data which Google is hankering to apply its data mining algorithms to. The lure of free unlimited storage masks another motivating impetus.

Google photos backup privacy full#

So a full strength photo storage lock in mechanism is go here. There’s even a feature that will delete photos from your phone when you’ve run out of local storage if the shots have already been backed up to the Google Photos cloud platform. (Well, and all the other quotidian stuff you end up photographing and screenshotting with your phone - like receipts, documents, directions, maps, menus, price-tags, places you’re going, things you like the look of and want to buy, etc etc.) But this is not generosity. These are your precious memories the company is offering to host gratis. Photos, as Google’s marketing materials lavishly reminded us, are not just a collection of pixels. There is also a paid version, for pros wanting to upload the most high res content but for everyone else your photos get squeezed gently through a lossless compression algorithm and shelved within Google’s infinite storage cloud for no monthly fee. Its flagship associated announcement was that unlimited cloud storage on Google Photos is free - meaning the product promises to cover all your back up photo needs. At its I/O developer conference last week Google announced a big revamp of its cloud-based photo sharing and storage product, uncoupling it from the Google+ social network, where usage was inevitably constrained, and sending it winging its way onto the wider web and iOS as a standalone app.