631–640 of 649 posts
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Yes I do, offline and offsite backup of important and valuable data stored on a HDD at my parents. Not the most seemless or user friendly options, but the privacy and security of my data is more important. I have also considered looking into mirroring my data on a trusted hosting provider for some day when I can afford to pay.
Yeah, that's a good strategy I suppose even if you do need to cart around a HDD to update every so often. You just need to make sure your parents backup is updated periodically.
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According to Google, it's “apps” – but this isn't Android apps; it's something that lets them directly fetch your emails from Google. I think it might be associated with OAuth, but despite their incredibly clear privacy policy I'm still not sure who exactly it is. Don't worry; I'm fairly sure it doesn't happen unless you click through a pop-up.
Are you just saying "Gmail has an API, and it is possible to authorize apps to access your Gmail via the API", which will be listed (along with every other app with access to your Google Account in any way) in your account permissions page @ https://myaccount.google.com/permissions Or something else?
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No, but neither photos or e-mail sizes today are anything like what they used to be either. And remember the quota is the general Google Account quota, not separate to photos. I already have 8GB of other data in Drive. Most of Googles products are also geared towards encouraging people to develop a habit of not deleting things, which creates a very different situation. So while this may not be a big problem at the mo…
> I see Photos suggest that at my current rate it'll last ~4 years before I'll need to start paying When gmail launched, I had to clean my old email every other week on all my addresses. A few years of normal usage before you have to remove old stuff is very reasonable. My free Google Drive is even larger than my O360 one that my workplace pays for.
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Google's "business" model has been in question for years now, I now am extra glad that I already downloaded all my data from Google, acquired my own domain and set up a nextcloud server. If I need more space, I buy another/larger hard drive, and never need to worry about data collection, services shutting down or prices changing.
But what do you do for off-site back though? Do you have a strategy for the 'house burning down' scenario?
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That's incredibly telling. Wow.
how is that surprising in any way? is it not expected that they cut costs if they're not making a profit?
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I don't think I'm making too many assumptions when I say RAW photos from a DSLR being uploaded to Google Photos is not anywhere near the intended use-case. However I still agree that 15GB of photos is pretty close to nothing these days.
Well... their own marketing does say: "A home for all your photos and videos" and they have a blog post titled: "Easy Wi-Fi backup from your Canon camera to Google Photos" in which they say "you can choose to automatically transfer original quality photos to Google Photos"
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Photos doesn't show ads or allow your photos to be used for ad targeting.
You don't think some team at Google is using photo metadata for ads? There's plenty of value prop in pushing different ads to me if you know that I'm on vacation based on location metadata, or knowing that I buy new shoes and take pics of them every 2 months in order to push me shoe ads at that cadence. I'd be astonished if that isn't the case today or won't be tomorrow.
I work on Google Photos and prior to that I worked on datacenter level infrastructure.
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Photos doesn't show ads or allow your photos to be used for ad targeting.
You don't think some team at Google is using photo metadata for ads? There's plenty of value prop in pushing different ads to me if you know that I'm on vacation based on location metadata, or knowing that I buy new shoes and take pics of them every 2 months in order to push me shoe ads at that cadence. I'd be astonished if that isn't the case today or won't be tomorrow.
Do you really think they are committing fraudulent inducement when they explicitly say that they aren't when selling the service?
> There's plenty of value prop in pushing different ads to me if you know that I'm on vacation based on location metadata
Marginally, probably not much when they already know that from your cellphone location data, your browser location data, the credit card data that they buy, etc.
> or knowing that I buy new shoes and take pics of them every 2 months in order to push me shoe ads at that cadence.
Again, something they probably get a lot clearer a picture of from buying credit card transaction data than photos.
Just thinking about Google's claims that it may [for which I read "will"] also start deleting data from inactive accounts: I would assume that, as well as their 'live' storage of user data in their data centres full of hard drives, with whatever RAID type redundancy they use there, Google also has longer term archived backups which I again assume would probably be tape based. So, would the data from a dormant account…
We have teams at Google whose sole purpose is to ensure that data that should be deleted is deleted in a timely manner (as defined by TOS and the law).
Basically, every piece of user data that is stored at Google has to have a documented and audited retention plan that covers how it is stored, how long it is retained, how it can be used, etc. The retention plans are reviewed by legal counsel and are audited by independent teams.
From a technical standpoint, Photos doesn't deal directly with individual machines or hard drives. There are several layers of abstraction to map what we think of as a "file" and the storage system are doing something that is _effectively_ at least a defrag on a regular basis.
[I work on Google Photos and used to work on storage infrastructure]