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Comment by GeekyBear | Hacker News Reader

Apple does photo recognition on your device.

Google, on the other hand, uploads photos to their server and does the analysis there.

There is the infamous case of the parents who Google tried to have arrested after they used their Android device to seek medical assistance for their child during lockdown. Their doctor asked them to send images of the problem, and Google called the police and reported the parents for kiddie porn.

> “I knew that these companies were watching and that privacy is not what we would hope it to be,” Mark said. “But I haven’t done anything wrong.”

The police agreed. Google did not.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil...

Google refused to return access to his account even after the police cleared him of wrongdoing.

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Google's reputation with privacy advocates is absolutely horrible, but that shouldn't have anything to do with Apple's practices. Comparing Apple and Google will indeed tell you a lot of interesting things, but that's not what this is about.

Kind of feels like it should be a crime for a private party to attempt to write terms into a contract that introduce punishments justified in terms of law, where that justification is based on an interpretation of law that's already been legally proven to the author of the contract to be a misinterpretation of said law.

It's sort of the crime of "contempt of court", but after the fact: receiving a judge's prescription about how you must interpret a law during a case, but then going right back to using a different interpretation when you leave court.

> Google refused to return access to his account even after the police cleared him of wrongdoing.

This is why I constantly work to help people reduce their dependence on Google. Screw that. If anyone ever tells you that they rely on Google for anything, show them this article.

I don't want to set up my own email server.

But I definitely live in fear of Google fucking up and disabling my account.

> Apple does photo recognition on your device.

If that were true, the whole homomorphic encryption stuff would be pointless.

> Apple does photo recognition on your device.

> Google, on the other hand, uploads photos to their server and does the analysis there.

The comment you're replying to (and the whole sub-thread in fact) isn't about if how Apple is doing it is the best/worst way, but rather before they do it, they don't ask for permission. Regardless of how they technically do it, the fact that they don't ask beforehand is what is being argued about here.

It seems strange to demand they ask “permission” in this instance but not e.g. to let you sort you photos by date, or album, or location.

(I agree this is the point in contention, I just don’t understand it).

Google doesn't send your pictures to their servers without your explicit consent. This is exactly what users expect. On Android, you can use your own self-hosted photos server and have it work exactly the same way Google Photos does. Google Photos does not have access to private Google-only APIs like Apple Photos has on iOS.

> Google doesn't send your pictures to their servers without your explicit consent.

The parents Google tried to get arrested in the story above do not agree.

> When Mark’s and Cassio’s photos were automatically uploaded from their phones to Google’s servers, this technology flagged them. Jon Callas of the E.F.F. called the scanning intrusive, saying a family photo album on someone’s personal device should be a “private sphere.” (A Google spokeswoman said the company scans only when an “affirmative action” is taken by a user; that includes when the user’s phone backs up photos to the company’s cloud.)

Google not only automatically uploaded their images to their server, it analyzed those images and reported the users to the police for kiddie porn based on a single false positive.

> user’s phone backs up photos to the company’s cloud.

I never enable cloud backups, because it means my shit is sent somewhere.

You don't have to enable it, since Google backs up your photos to their servers by default.

Then they proceed to claim those automatic backups are an "affirmative action" that justifies them scanning the contents of your images as well.

>You don't have to enable it, since Google backs up your photos to their servers by default.

When setting up a new phone (and many times thereafter) they prompt you to enable photos backup. It's not on by default if I remember correctly.

It is not enabled by default if we trust it. In fact, I am not even logged in to Google.

If you don't enable backup, Google Photos randomly reprompts on a regular basis with a "sure would be a shame if something happened to your photos!" modal. It's very easy to accidentally turn it on without noticing when this happens, if one has preemptively clicked where they expect a different UI element to be.

It's not on by default. It asks when you first add your account to Android.

> Google backs up your photos to their servers by default.

You keep saying that, but it remains false. The parents explicitly opted in to sending their photos to Google.

When I first ran Google Photos on my Android phone, it asked me if I want to enable automatic backup to Google. There were definitely some dark patterns there, but it was easy and obvious how to opt out.

If you care about not sending photos to Google, it's pretty obvious how to not have that happen.

IMO, Google is not the bad guy here, although when it was explained to them that the photos were legitimate, they should definitely have reenabled the account.

I'm OK with Google scanning photos that I send to them that will be stored on their servers. Honestly, how can they not?

Google Photos "consent" is one of the worst dark patterns I regularly encounter.

About weekly it prompts me with a huge popup whether I want to continue without backup, with "enable backup" selected by default. If I deselect this I'm prompted with another popup asking me to back up specific selected photos. If I misclick either of these (which is easy, since they pop up after briefly showing my photos which I'm actively trying to tap on), then Google will start hoovering up all my photos without confirmation.

Their "consent" form is user-hostile and it's disingenuous to hold it as an example of Google protecting privacy.

Pro tip: install Google Gallery which (ironically) is effectively a de-Googled Photos. Unfortunately it's also stripped down in other ways but it suffices for simply viewing photos on your own device.

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