Thanks for giving us all the machine learning data. We no longer need your services.
Can google guarantee this data is not used to fuel their ad or other businesses in anyway ?
Can they guarantee US Law Enforcement Agencies(LEA) will not have access without due process and informing you ?
Can they guarantee LEAs from other countries will not given access to this data ?
If you send it to Google it is unequivocally not private.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/12/19/federal...
By providing ML training data, you're indirectly supporting the consolidation of power in the hands of the few who have the ability to surveil everyone and the physical might to enforce their will.
And that is enabled by VC funded culture, where you have million of dollars invested in companies, which can then offer services at a loss investing in something else (market share, training data, etc.).
Using smaller companies which charge honestly for the services they provide is probably more sustainable in the long term.
(I use Flickr, Gphotos and an S3 bucket but I’m paranoid)
Also, Flickr has done an arguably nastier bait and switch when they announced the end of their unlimited free storage. At least Google seems to be willing to keep the photos already uploaded around. For now.
Smaller companies also commonly get acquired, shuttered, or become big companies in their own right. There's no panacea here. I think by the third or fourth time I was migrating from "the honesty priced option" the reality settled in that "honestly priced" is usually just an uninventive advertising moniker used for overpriced underdeveloped products.
Compare it to Google, where they can operate under a loss for a particular service (like Google Photos) in order to increase profits in a different market (like AI recognition tools). Once they are done with whatever they wanted to do, they can close down the service without much consequence, the business lives on.