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Comment by Sebb767 | Hacker News Reader

I honestly can't see the outrage here. Sure, they've closed their free tier, but they keep up the promise for Pixel owners and do not count images previously uploaded. That's really more than one can ask for in something they get for free.

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The internet is full of entitled people. I've never seen such entitled people in real life. Unfortunately lately HN is no different. I am also an avid user of Google Photos. From my perspective, they did keep their promise. They will store your photos for free before a certain timeline. Just because someone did a favor to you for some time, that doesn't mean you are entitled to their help forever.

i mean, paying for google photos storage is not even that expensive. it's $10 for 2TB, which i happily pay every month because it means i don't have to worry about photos backups.

Try running a content platform with an API.

I've never comes across so many developers who feel like they are entitled to unlimited API access for free so they can build businesses on top of your platform.

Yeah man, when someone says "i'll give you $5 ever day for life" and then in 5 years they say "i'm not going to do that anymore starting tomorrow" and being upset about that is such entitled behavior.

The correct analogy would be "you can ask me for $5 as often as you want, I will give it to you for free, and you can keep it for life" and then 5 years down the road they say "starting 7 months from now, I'll stop giving you $5 when you ask me for it, but obviously you can still keep all the money I gave you".

I feel like people misconstrue "you can upload your photos and (store them for free for life)" to "you can (upload your photos and (store them for free for life) for life)".

I'm with you. I'm a big fan of Google Photos, in fact I'd go so far as to say I'd take very few pictures if not for it. Not because of the storage, but because of the ease with which it allows me to reminisce and organize my photos. I'd happily pay the couple bucks a month for it if it's what keeps it viable, I'd much rather that than the kill the service.

And they're giving 8 months notice and everything up to that point will continue to be supported for free. It's kind of crazy to me that people have a problem with it.

Has anyone cracked the "DRM" on this? Can I just install a hacked app and have it think I'm a pixel owner? Does it just use the EXIF headers to identify the device?

Why risk getting your Google account banned?

As I understood it, it is only free for previous Pixel owners until they buy a new Pixel. So it is free for the lifetime of the device, not the users lifetime.

Isn't that how most people would have understood the offer anyways? Why should Google store the photos from e.g. your new OnePlus for free just because you owned a Pixel in the past?

Presumably because they promised the service in return for the purchase of a Pixel device, not its continued use.

I feel like the email they sent is a master class in misleading. The feeling and subtext make you feel like nothing is happening or you'll be better off:

> To build for the future and welcome even more memories, Google Photos is changing its unlimited high-quality storage policy. Starting Ju ne 1 , 2 02 1, new photos and videos backed up in high-quality will begin to count toward users' 15 GB of Google Account storage, which is shared across Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos.

> Your Pixel device will not be impacted by this change. High - quality uploads from your Pixel device will continue to be free and unlimited. This exemption only applies to uploads made from your Pixel device, not uploads from other devices or via photos.google.com.

That's the thing though, you don't really get it for free do you? You just pay with your privacy and data instead.

To whom do you believe google has disclosed private user photos?

they're so big disclosing those photos to their algorithms is questionable privacy-wise.

If you know this is a risk, then Google certainly does.

what is the privacy loss outcome that you are suggesting has happened as a result of photos being disclosed to algorithms?

use your imagination. Sheesh this is such a boring line of questioning that borders on disingenuous and obtuse for a social news site that caters to people in AdTech.

You've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines a lot, by using HN for political and ideological battle, flaming other users, and so on. We've had to warn you about this many times:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23452134

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21480233

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21480058

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20717150

Would you please fix this? The intended use of the site is curious, thoughtful conversation. I'm not going to ban you right now because (not counting the last week) you've posted good, on-topic comments too. But if you continue along the same lines we're going to have to.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That's interesting that you seem to think it's my problem. I also find it disingenuous that you are linking to my previous comments publically. Are you trying to shame me? Maybe you need to disallow political discussions period? Have you considered that the people I am replying to are also fighting a political battle that you are biased for?

All in all, yes I believe certain things passionately. Like racism and sexist exist in America, specifically in software and corporate America. I also believe that this bias shows on this community because of the demographic or people who browse and comment here.

I'm not trying to shame you; sorry if it had that effect. I post links like that when I imagine it might be helpful to users who are trying to decide (as users always try to decide) if the moderator is being excessive or not.

Banning political discussions is not possible for a bunch of reasons, but the most important one is that it would be bad for curiosity, which is the thing we try to optimize HN for (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). There are too many intellectually interesting topics with political overlap—and ultimately, some political overlap on virtually every topic.

At the same time, not moderating political discussions is also not an option because that would also be bad for curiosity. So we're in a bit of a tradeoff with constraints on either side and no easy solution. I've written about this a lot in the past: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... If you or anyone reads those explanations and still has a question that I haven't answered yet, I'd like to know what it is.

As for bias, everyone always feels that the mods are biased against their position when we moderate this way (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). I'd never claim we're unbiased—who could?—but the bar for reaching that conclusion needs to be a little higher. I can show you a long, long list of HN commenters complaining bitterly that HN is biased in favor of your positions (i.e. the politics/ideology you happen to favor). Every passionate user feels that the bias runs against their side.

I'd be cautious about assuming things about the "demographic or people who browse and comment here". We don't have that data—no one does—and HN is basically a gigantic projection screen or Rohrschach diagram out of which people draw their own pre-existing positions. (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) I know this because everyone does this, and the universal property their statements have in common is not their conclusions about HN (those are wildly contradictory) but the fact that they always see HN—both mods and community—as opposed to their own view. (One explanation for this is https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...)

Network effects, unintended side effects, operator incompetence, risk of information leak... GDPR should have me covered, but I won’t be able to remove myself from deep learning models they already have.

That is not true. Google retrains its models periodically. Removed data is not used for training models. Also I'm not sure that private user photos can even be used for training cross user models because I don't see how these photos could possibly be disclosed to raters, so there would be no ground truth.

Not OP but technically the FBI as a matter of public fact and obligation (child pornography in that case). Probably more "run a known hash list against it and peak manually before reporting to verify that it isn't a freak collision with a perectly innocent photograph of a cupcake" style unless reported.

In the US there is "no reasonable expectation of privacy" for data voluntarily given to third-parties [0]

US government agencies can simply ask for such data, and companies can just pass it along, all without even evoking any of the countless surveillance laws [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine

[1] https://cantheyseemydick.com/

> but they keep up the promise for Pixel owners

True, but for how long?

Thats not how promises work.

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