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> I don't really get the business model. An open source stack makes sense for products targeted towards programmers.

> Most people that back up their pics in ~the cloud~ won't have the technical skills to do self-host

Which is why they are offering a managed service as well. Even people with the technical skills are not always inclined to selfhost.

> With Dropbox I guess you could accomplish the same, but you'd need to encrypt manually. Maybe for people with a lot of dick pics or illegal material this product is worth the 4x price

Privacy is for criminals and storing CSAM, right? Why would you even want Dropbox at this point, Google Drive is all you need. Unless you wanted to help diagnose your child[1] and unfortunately the photo was synchronized to Drive and flagged.

You have every right to expect your photos to stay private. Even if those are just a landscape. Why should you be obligated to have an AI scan them for offending content or scan them to detect who you met and when (surely so they can build a yearly recap for you, how kind!)? Did you ever get consent from everyone on your photos for this sharing and processing?

You may not be interested in E2EE or open source, and that's absolutely fine. But you shouldn't actively undermine it by associating encryption and privacy with crimes.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/21/23315513/google-photos-cs...

The GP isn't undermining it, they're talking about the strength of the need. Clearly someone facing threat of punishment has a greater need for encryption than those who aren't.

Obviously there's a question of whether people in the latter group may end up in the former, perhaps by mistake, but would that risk be sufficient to make them pay 4x?

You're getting butthurt about stuff that's not relevant. The point is the encryption is: 1 - trivial to layer yourself 2 - not a viable business model

You just need to look at Signal. It's at the same price ($0) as its competition (not 4x). And messages you can't really encryption yourself. It's still struggling to get a market foothold.

Yeah, it'd be great to have Google/Dropbox/etc with privacy. Sure. Nothing wrong with that. But you also have to pay the bills and feed your babies. This isn't a charity. Maybe I'm missing something, but this product make no sense in the market. They can't even match the market prices. They're toast

> 1 - trivial to layer yourself

If you are techy, this is made to be shared with families and friends, which won't do that.

Agreed, but the market of people that are not tech, care about their photos not being mined, and are willing to pay 4x the price I think is miniscule

> Most people that back up their pics in ~the cloud~ won't have the technical skills to do self-host

And that's probably better for them, because it's much easier to lose data from your own NAS than it is for a cloud storage provider to do so.

> The intersection of people that care about open source and people that want to backup their photos also seems really minuscule.

This seems like a lack of imagination, which is not to be confused with any deficiency of the software or its business model. As for me, I think this completely rules.