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Comment by foxpurple | Hacker News Reader

What cloud service are you putting your images on? I would be shocked if google photos hasn’t already been doing this.

You don't need the cloud: syncthing can sync your phone and your computer together without any issues. No nasty cloud provider involved: https://syncthing.net/

You can even sync to $nasty_cloud_provider and don't provide the syncthing password. Problem solved!

What? Syncthing is not a backup program, it, as the name suggests, syncs folders and files. There is no password involved.

Check out: https://docs.syncthing.net/branch/untrusted/html/users/untru...

Syncthing now supports untrusted device sync[0] (i.e. storing an encrypted copy on an untrusted device) in a recent version, though this is still on beta.

[0]: https://docs.syncthing.net/users/untrusted.html

Looks like Syncthing doesn’t have support/client for iOS though?

There may be 3rd party apps like https://www.mobiussync.com

For some reason it’s not available in France. Is it limited to the US?

And because no one except Apple have access to the private iOS APIs required to run background processes forever, you would have to remember to keep the app in the foreground while it completes syncing on a regular basis.

Also, you can restore an iPhone from what SyncThing can back up. Only an iTunes or equivalent iCloud device backup can. They also can’t back up things like MFA keys / seeds / IVs.

I’m glad ST exists and it’s useful for syncing photos for home use, but it is not a viable iCloud alternative, nor could one be made due to the private iOS API issue.

Cloud services doing this isn't the problem and they are already doing it. The problem is your device doing this.

Imagine if your Tesla reported back to Tesla who was in your car and sent that to the authorities if they thought someone in your car was "illegal".

You honestly can't know if it does that already or not.

Coming in the not-so-far-future.

Actually Tesla's do client side machine learning. When tesla needs training data of a bike for example, they can remotely "query" all the cars on the road and have the cars do client side detection of the stored footage and driving data and send over only the data that contains bikes.

Cloud is other people's computers. So, get your own server, or use someone's you trust. or use e2e encryption.

That would be great if I could run an iCloud back-end on my home servers. Unfortunately, I can’t, and no software other than iCloud can do what iCloud does on iOS due to Apple’s usage of private iOS APIs to accomplish things like persistent background sync or syncing parts of the OS which would be required to do a full device restore that aren’t accessible to user space apps.

Why do you need to put your images on a cloud service at all? Just use a spare disk.

It's just a matter of time till they start scanning all image files on the SSD. Then documents (country-specific probably)

I’m saying it because apple is scanning iCloud photos here. Unless I am mistaken, local only photos are not scanned.

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