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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

This is an indication that Google underestimates the value of data stored by users.

E.g. if this was about storing monetary data, this would never have happened.

> This is an indication that Google underestimates the value of data stored by users.

That becomes apparent if you ever had any issue with a google product. There's no way to resolve issues outside of canned answers from "AI" systems and public forums.

> E.g. if this was about storing monetary data, this would never have happened.

Let’s hope none of the images were NFT “assets” then haha

But with nfts don't you legally own them?

If you subscribe to the cypherpunk mantra that ”code is law“, then yes. Otherwise, if you stick to the law that lawyers and judges apply, then mostly no. NFT ownership does not come with any rights to the underlying asset, unless specified in an accompanying contract.

This story from last week seems to indicate that that is not true, though it hardly makes Google look perfect!

https://twitter.com/samwcyo/status/1569897392560050178

Discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32835190

>Google underestimates the value of data stored by users.

Of course they do. How can they possibly put any value on endless PB of holiday snaps? They only care that you are now reliant on them to store your memories.

Do you have any suggestions for a secure/private option to store photos? I'm not sure what would be best. (Dang, I really want to move away from Goo now)

Your own devices, with a proper backup solution (which you should already have with or without your photos in it). Nobody can mess with your data then.

Personally, I use Syncthing to sync between devices, including a NAS as a target, which regularly backs up to Backblaze.

This sounds a bit like what I do. I r-sync two different libraries to NAS then upload them to Backblaze B2. Post r-sync success result to a muted Slack channel and failure to an unmuted alert channel.

rsync -av /Source /Destination rsync -h

iCloud

iCloud may be secure, but private? No end-to-end encryption and Apple scans the user's content. It's no better than Google Photos in that regard.

I'm using Nextcloud. Works great.

Do you self-host it? Do you access it with Android and iOS?

Amazon photos is pretty good as a like for like alternative

Photoprism

As a starter, look for a "dumb" service that doesn't treat photos differently from any other type of binary blob. No thumbnails. No grouping by date or location. No tagging other people. The storage service should only concern itself with safekeeping the binaries you upload, not analyzing and processing them. Use your own machine to do the latter.

Backblaze B2.

I stood up a pair of QNAP NAS for both my parents and I, and encrypt-then-backup their photos/documents to my NAS, and vice-versa. RAID 5 or 6 keeps hardware failure at bay, and keeping them tucked away in our respective homes makes fire or flood irrelevent (for this).

QNAP or Asustor has standalone apps my parents can use as well. Without getting your parents involved, you could either pay for remote hosting for your off-site, or trade RAID space with a friend.

Definitely use client side encryption, if only because it defeats attempts to "repair" image data or rewrite exit headers, etc.

Another good test: upload your photo collection, then download it and binary diff the two sets of files.

Managed Nextcloud hosting in the EU is an option.

Dropbox, Box, a Microsoft service.

Or maybe you overestimate the data of users?

No doubt the average value of data is not very high. That doesn't mean it also holds for the most valuable data stored.

It's naive and/or biased to think that. Everyone makes mistakes, everywhere, all the time.

That's a fairly serious accusation to level. Google's bad behavior here is not that their compression algorithm ruined users photos. Google's bad behavior is running a compression algorithm at all.

Every photo sharing and storing site compresses photos for view. The originals are still there (read further down in the issue).

That's not the point. I doubt that the engineers who worked on the compression algorithms would store their own precious photos using the same techniques.

Also, when was the last time you heard a banker say that everyone makes mistakes all the time.

Hi, I work on the processing algorithms at Google like the one here (not sure about this particular issue) and I use Google photos for all my old photos. People at Google read Hacker News and fix things, they just don't comment on specifics for things like this.

most users aren't paying for Google Photos. sounds to me like they're accurately estimating the value.

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