So Google is now preventing people from removing location data from photos taken with Pixel phones.

Remember when Google’s corporate motto was “don’t be evil?”

Obviously, accurate location data on photos is more useful to a data mining operation like Google.

From Google: “Important: You can only update or remove estimated locations. If the location of a photo or video was automatically added by your camera, you can’t edit or remove the location.”

It’s enshitification in action.

Source: https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6153599?hl=en&sjid=8103501961576262529-AP

#technology #tech @technology #business #enshitification #Android #Google @pluralistic #infosec

  • petrescatraian
    2•1 year ago

    Thank god I no longer use their service after their unlimited option was cut. I was only using it as a backup solution, as I still prefer keeping stuff on my computer, rather than uploading to the cloud. I use #Shotwell to manage my photos and before that, I was using Windows Live Gallery while I was still on Windows (If anyone remembers). It was a really powerful and underrated piece of software, albeit proprietary, that was doing pretty much the same things as Google Photos is doing now - but locally, on the computer that you own (yea, I do sound like I am older than I actually am, maybe I am, in some regards, haha - but reading all these news about how Google is manipulating user data is just infuriating).

    • @aeternum
      3•1 year ago

      You should look into nextcloud. It’s like google photos, but self hosted. It’s pretty good.

        • @aeternum
          2•1 year ago

          Dang, that looks pretty good. I’d prefer self hosted though.

        • petrescatraian
          1•1 year ago

          @ajkelkar Wow, that’s really interesting. Including this:

          @ente@mstdn.social wrote:

          ente preserves your encrypted photos to 3 different clouds, in 3 different locations, including an underground fallout shelter. This guarantees that your data is as safe as it can possibly be.

          I never thought about the safety of the data, I mostly thought about ownership. But this really is something to think about

          I really am more into what @aeternum suggested, as this allows you to control your data, but as Nextcloud is such a complete solution, I feel more of an urge to use all the services provided, so for me it’s quite overkill to use it just for photos. I was more looking into a solution like Photostow back in the day, but they seem to have pretty much forgotten about this project. And yea, it is not open source.