Hacker News Reader

Comment by blackoil | Hacker News Reader

You can control that.

You can, and I did, but at some point I must've accidentally fumbled one of the many 'would you like to back up your data to...?' requests as I recently had a warning that my Google drive was nearly full. This was perplexing as I very rarely use it, so I check and lo! A years worth of photos off my daughter there. Not happy.

This happened to my mom too. She told me she can't do any more photos because her storage is full. So I checked her android phone a and somehow the cloud backup got activated (we explicitly turned that off!!) and our family photos were uploaded to google cloud..

I hate google so much for doing this.

Surely that's reason enough to avoid Google from now on? They are simply not a trustworthy company for personal data.

To what extent? Google buries a lot of their privacy options deep within settings of individual apps and the settings menu

Eh? Afai, it prompts you to enable it these days.

Heck, Google is removing Location History storage from their side and making it device side only. Users in the past few weeks are getting notified to trigger the migration to device storage or all data is deleted.

Except Google Photos, which every couple days starts up telling me my phone is backing up (it isn't yet, not until I confirm it on the screen) and presenting an opt-out for uploading photos to Google. That's in Poland, EU, so I'm not sure how is that even legal. Next time, I'll ask my local DPA.

If you refuse to upload all your photos, Google Photos randomly sometimes pops up a second request to upload your 200 most recent photos instead.

I declined the first request that interrupted my task, then tried to select a photo to continue my work, but the "Yes" button for uploading recent photos appeared over top of the photo just as I clicked. Google Photos immediately began uploading my photos without my true consent.

I have the same issue. That's part of what triggered my op

eh? Two years ago they didn't allow MRU in GMaps if you weren't logged on.[0]

And with every new phone I always power on it without an account, update, reset and only then add an account; I had my share of 'I did disable that thing'

EDIT:

[0] and they claimed what there is not enough storage for it. On a fresh phone with 128Gb on board. For the small array of ~30-100 letters. Fuckers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com