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Show HN: We built an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos

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101–110 of 421 posts

Re: Show HN: We built an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos

#101
post #40

Why does this app need to link my identifiers and contact info to my identity? I would feel a lot more comfortable with this if it didn't collect any data of mine, and you were just storing ciphertext. I don't want an account, and I don't want to give you my name or email.

Hey, we do need some information to get the product to work well. You can see the bits of information we collect, along with the reasoning here: https://ente.io/privacy/#account-data

Re: Show HN: We built an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos

#102
In my opinion, people who don’t trust google (like myself) would not trust every other company too. The perfect solution for me would be something that I can self host on my LAN with a clean and intuitive app like the google photos one, that would be a service that I would pay for.

Re: Show HN: We built an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos

#103

Your homepage says "protect your photos/faces etc. from algorithms" The algorithms are what makes Google Photos; Google Photos. If I wanted to just store my photos I'd throw them in a S3 bucket or Dropbox or something. Google Photos lets me automatically categorise my photos by person, lets me search my library using text search for anything (e.g. I can search 'museum' and see pictures I've taken in museums). That is…

Am I the only one who never realized you can search "museum" and see your museum photos?

Now that you've mentioned it, yes, I'd like to try that. But as a counterpoint to your argument, I've never needed it, and I suspect that a lot of people may not actually be getting the same value propositions that you're getting.

On the other hand, Google Photos is Google Photos. But it's often a mistake to compete directly with an established product. New ideas tend to win by transcending the competition.

I propose that if this Show HN turns into a product, it will be because it does something people didn't realize they wanted. Maybe that's privacy. I don't know.

Re: Show HN: We built an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos

#104
post #30

This is looks super cool, however not something I'd be interested in using myself if I can't selfhost it (at least it looks like thats not possible from the website).

Self-hosting a zero knowledge service is probably unnecessary. If you're hosting the service, there's no need for data to be encrypted client-side. Unless, of course, you were intending on running the service on a public cloud which you didn't control, but that's something I don't think many privacy conscious folk would do. There's plenty of open source, self-hosted alternatives to Google Photos.

Yeah, having attempted to operate a service very similar to this (only more focused on general encrypted cloud storage) I will say there are no good economics in usage-based billing. You're much better off selling a license to use the software and give users the ability to use common cloud storage providers (minimally the s3-compatible ones but also things like Google Drive) as the backing for this. Even safer from a legal perspective would be not having accounts at all and allowing users to purchase a 1-year license based on license keys that are cryptographically validated but not stored anywhere. Then it's impossible to do anything user specific whether you are compelled to or not.

Re: Show HN: We built an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos

#105
post #2

Clickable links! [1]: https://ente.io [2]: https://ente.io/apk [3]: https://play.google.com/store /apps/details?id=io.ente.photos [4]: https://apps.apple.com/in/app/ente-photos/id1542026904 [5]: https://web.ente.io [6]: https://github.com/ente-io/bhari-frame/releases/latest [7]: https://libsodium.gitbook.io [8]: https://ente.io/architecture [9]: https://github.com/ente-io [10]: https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comme…

(Since the original links are now clickable, I propose that it would be nice if HN made all links in self-text posts clickable by default. It seems like it might foster a healthier community, since it will feel less like it's a special privilege to have clickable links.)

Re: Show HN: We built an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully agree. It's a hard sell getting people to switch from an evil but known cloud provider to an unknown cloud provider that claims to not be evil. What we do not need is more cloud offerings that can change, vanish or lock us out at the blink of an algorithm's eye. What we need, rather, are reliable and easy-to-use solutions that allow us to retain full control of our data (i.e. self-hosted and offline) while ha…

Hey, so the project had initially started off as a self-hostable software (with an option to buy a pre-configured device). We realized soon that it's hard to monetize such a product in the consumer space to the point where it can become self-sustaining. We don't have a problem with offering a self-hosted variant. But given our limited engineering bandwidth we had to take a call on who our target market should be, and…

I get the decision but I think it misses part of the problem: how do you convince people like your mum and dad to start paying for backups and how do you convince them to pay extra for privacy?

I suspect the way it usually happens is that somebody your parents trust (like you) tells them to sign up for a privacy-preserving backup service.

But who's going to tell them to do that? Do you have the money to pay for advertising?

Normally, I'd suspect it's the tech-savvy younger folks who'd tell them to buy something like this but with your pricing and lack of self-hosted options, I suspect you've alienated a large portion of the tech-savvy audience you need to advocate for your product.

Re: Show HN: We built an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So you're going to implement algorithms then? Yes, we will implement the algorithms, purely on the client side, such that we don't hold indexes to your personal data. But I understand how that piece of text could have thrown you off, I'll think of ways to rephrase it. Thanks for pointing it out.

Actually I'm really curious how you do this. If the photos aren't stored client side, then how do you search? Do you have a thumbnail of every photo client side? Is that enough? I mean ImageNet scores are still pretty low for small/fast neural nets. And ImageNet isn't even representative of real world photos. So obviously to be successful you're going to have to continue training. So how do you do this in a privacy p…

> Do you have a thumbnail of every photo client side

In the happy path the files/thumbnails are indexed before they are uploaded. But we are designing a framework that will pull files/thumbnails for indexing if they are unindexed or indexed by older models.

> how do you do this in a privacy preserving way

Our accuracy will not match that offered by services who index your data on their servers. But there's a trade off between user experience and privacy here, and we are hopeful that ente will be a viable option for an audience who is willing to sacrifice a bit of one for a lot of the other.

Re: Show HN: We built an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos

#108

Very reasonable pricing, though you could advertise the free 'trial' tier a bit more prominently. I thought the service was paid only until I re-checked the pricing page and read the tiny gray on black text before writing this comment. You also didn't set a single tracking cookie. Nice.

I'll increase the opacity of that line, thanks for the feedback!

Re: Show HN: We built an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos

#109
If you still want to use the algorithms but keep the data private (self hosted and open source), I can suggest Librephotos. It has face detection, object detection, place markers, etc. It is not perfect but from what I have seen, it's currently still the best self hosted open source solution.

Re: Show HN: We built an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos

#110
post #90

Your homepage says "protect your photos/faces etc. from algorithms" The algorithms are what makes Google Photos; Google Photos. If I wanted to just store my photos I'd throw them in a S3 bucket or Dropbox or something. Google Photos lets me automatically categorise my photos by person, lets me search my library using text search for anything (e.g. I can search 'museum' and see pictures I've taken in museums). That is…

We need to make this stuff local again, that will be the real competitor to big corp Foo... no servers, no end-to-end, no service cost, no ads, no privacy issues, no random revokation of accounts without recourse, just one end - the users. We can have face detection etc locally if people want it... cycles, it's going to happen eventually.

we had that, but almost everyone decided they like the cloud better.
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