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Comment by JimDabell | Hacker News Reader

It’s even worse than that! There is no delete all feature! So if you have 100k photos and make the mistake of saying yes to Google Photos just once, it will fill up all your storage space, block your email until you pay for extra storage, then force you to delete all your photos manually, one page at a time, before you can stop using it. I think that trap is the sleaziest thing I’ve seen Google do.

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They actually did build a way to undo enabling backup that removed all the photos added from the enabled device. I guess that's a tacit acknowledgement that people are likely to enable this accidentally.

I remember there being a mini scandal about this feature being limited to 3 uses or something, but can't seem to find the story right now.

https://support.google.com/photos/thread/405321957?hl=en&msg...

This was even more annoying when they started including whatsapp backups in your quota and sent a load of people over quota. And as far as I know there's no alternative for whatsapp backups apart from plugging in a USB cable and hoping Whatsapp don't change the method between now and when you need to restore it

It is possible to back up the WhatsApp folder if using Android, with the likes of total commander or any other file browser.

It can then be decrypted with a simple access to the _sim card_, i.e. a way to receive a message, meaning that anything backed up to Google drive should not considered safe from a dedicated state actor (even if the other party did it). It is quite easy to demonstrate with a new phone or an emulator.

I have doubts on how much the US gov needs to break the Whisper protocol when they have such easy to get side attacks.

I was under the impression that to backup the encrypted whatsapp you need to enable your own encryption key, which presumably makes it more secure but of course that's trusting Meta's implementation

The Whatsapp's restore process if you're not on Google Drive is unreliable too. I keep a separate backup but also have to keep the Google Drive backup on because it's too risky now I've seen it fail to restore and was only able to rescue it using the Google Drive backup I had also. If it just had my backup I'd have lost the lot.

I wrote some JavaScript and paste it in my console to automate this when I left Google Photos. The “data avarice” is astounding.

Careful, don't cloud deletions sync, i.e. remove the previously offline-only files from your devices?

Are Google Photos stored in Google Drive? Because Google Collab has access to Google Drive so you can write some nifty Python scripts to move your data between Drive accounts and do mass renames/deletes etc.

No, I've never seen Google Photos reflected in any Google Drive interface (web, OS integration, etc.) which on the one hand makes sense (think of Google Photos more like a database-driven black box app than a hierarchical filesystem) but on the other hand Google Drive does show gdocs, gsheets, etc. (which is also sort of a black box app, as the "files" seen in GDrive are merely lightweight stubs).

Only in storage quota views do Photos and Drive (and Gmail, etc.) commingle.

Mobster tactics from google. Nice.

Just remember that Google always kills its products, and they are an advertising company.

I'm joking, I hope, but Google ain't what it used to be.

Which part was meant to be a joke?

I guess the hopeful one, "Google always kills its products", suggesting that the bad product in this thread is also doomed. I hold this same hope, almost entirely unironically, about so many things.

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