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No, ive never heard of film :| Briefly glimpsing a negative, and being forced to make an enlargment and checking the print quality, are two different things. And obviously you can't prohibit viewing a negative you haven't seen yet...thus prohibiting the printing.
This story should serve as a warning and a motivation to move away from iCloud, Google Cloud, and alike for video and photo storage. The easiest thing is to just purchase a drive or NAS and store your media on it. If you're a bit tech-savvy, you can run your own NextCloud. I run NextCloud on Hetzner, 1TB storage box + web server for a total of $7 a month. Or you can get Hetzner to run the NextCloud for you for about…
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Power concentration is inevitable regardless of the system because in order to enforce decentralization you would need to, well, concentrate power. Our best bet is to shame those using products of unethical companies.
Google isn't a government entity, it's a private company. Had there been more restrictions on what tech corporations (and corporations as a whole) could do, power could have been limited by the concentrated power of government. The issue here is that Google can dictate how we live our lives so heavily without any of its users having a say on how Google and its services should be run. The promotion of Laissez-faire ca…
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This is at best authoritarianism or corportatism not fascism. There is no ultranationalism, there is no "othering", there is no enforced hierarchy of individuals.
> There is no ultranationalism Wait for the next EU lawsuit against Google, you will drown under all the comments claiming it is an attack on American companies.
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Welcome to fascism. A private company is the de-facto judge, jury and executioner because it owns half the infrastructure you live your life on.
And you can’t even escape these companies by moving to another country. They have their tendrils everywhere, except in places that consciously prevent them - which is usually done by even worse tyrannies like China/Russia. Always makes me laugh when I see employees of Google, Amazon etc. claiming to be “anti-fascist” and “standing in solidarity with the common man” etc etc…
In my personal view the internet became one big country with overlapping laws and government policies and collusion by corporations. Ever so often I use google to see what search results they can muster but otherwise I don't use cloud storage and do not find myself depending on google. For email I try to teach my friends how to use Thunderbird so they can click a button and their email is mostly GPG encrypted.
If I wanted to share files with someone that will not fit in that GPG encrypted email then I plonk them down on a mini-PC or a VM and share them over HTTPS with cache-control headers to reduce risk of file caches or SFTP with authentication. This is just my own preference and I am a stodgy cranky old bastard but if someone decides that basic auth is too much friction then it was not important for them to receive the files. I implement my own data retention and destruction policies. How my doctor or lawyer decides to store the files is up to them. I can only hope they are wise enough to not store things on their fondle-slab. An intelligent doctor should be able to handle basic authentication and/or be able to follow simple instructions for creating and sharing a GPG public key with me.
Or I could just snail-mail them an encrypted USB drive, however a GPG encrypted email should suffice for sending a few little images to a doctor. Some will bring up rubber hoses and wrenches but there are mitigations for such things. Some might even want legislation to to bandage these dark patterns but experience has taught me to not trust that corporations would be held to account at the same level and standards as citizens.
This story should serve as a warning and a motivation to move away from iCloud, Google Cloud, and alike for video and photo storage. The easiest thing is to just purchase a drive or NAS and store your media on it. If you're a bit tech-savvy, you can run your own NextCloud. I run NextCloud on Hetzner, 1TB storage box + web server for a total of $7 a month. Or you can get Hetzner to run the NextCloud for you for about…
Can NextCloud do OCR on the pictures, identify people and allow search by objects in the photo? Because those are the killer features for me that make it super useful to use Google photos.
What if someone emails stock photos to Google execs that are known to trigger Google's child abuse algorithm? They would have to build a way to re-activate banned accounts to get their own accounts back.
Someone with enough clout would 100% be able to get accounts reinstated (likely without even needing a police report of no wrong-doing).
Google’s refusal to have appropriate moderation and support for edge-case situations is a completely different thing.
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The article mentions two independent instances of this process within Google, where appeal is not possible even with a police report that completely exonerates the suspect. It sounds to me as if a class action lawsuit is the most appropriate remedy for the unfortunates who are caught in this predicament. Their only problem is finding each other. For the rest of us, it is unwise to use cloud storage for photos, for se…
They don’t block CSAM because “it’s illegal” - in fact, they can’t be forced to do it without it breaking your 4th amendment rights. Instead, all CSAM reporting and blocking is done at-will by these companies, and some don’t participate (Apple[0]), so it’s a policy decision by these companies. I imagine unblocking someone due to them being exonerated by a government entity is legally risky - perhaps doing so would be…
EARN IT threatens to expand this to CSAM. Meanwhile, anti-CSAM legislation continues to develop in other jurisdictions, and being global entities big tech companies are exposed to that risk. Hence why Apple published explicit plans to actively scan (albeit locally on-device and with creative use of cryptography to soften the blow) for CSAM on their devices, and integrate with NCMEC. They’ve shelved this for now, but made it clear that they’re not done with this concept.
Big tech dreads the loss of their liability shield, and these measures are an attempt to stay ahead of the policymakers. It’s not as free a choice as it may appear, and the federal government does not appear restrained by the constitution here.
I keep telling anyone who will listen that they need to move every aspect of their online identity away from the big tech giants, and make sure that each type of service (email, webpage, memory storage, document storage, backups, contacts, etc) is compartmentalized in such a way that if one gets removed then it wont affect the others in any way. Imagine having all your memories in the form of images and videos taken…