
Why Google Is Suddenly Obsessed with Your Photos - surak
https://theringer.com/google-photos-data-collection-e8578b3256e0
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DanCarvajal
Suddenly? Picasa was pretty popular back in the day.

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ge96
Is that a thing "Anything you upload to our site belongs to us" I was
wondering about that myself for my own services. If I can get people's data,
then you could use that to train ML with and then your problem of lack of data
is solved haha... but this is beyond me at this point just thinking out loud.

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kiallmacinnes
Many services have used this as a default for a long time, anything you give
them is theirs - either through directly assigning ownership to them, or by
giving them a perpetual license to use for almost any purpose they wish.

I've not actually checked this over recent years, but I feel like things have
gotten slightly better, where services are no longer quite as bad as they used
to be.. however I've no data to back that up..

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matt4077
Most of the time these were either misunderstandings, or wilfully misleading
scare stories: These services need some sort of license to work. Even just to
show you your own photos, you need to give Google/Facebook/Apple/whoever a
license.

That license was usually quite liberal, i. e. "a non-exclusive, royalty-free
perpetual license to perform your works...". That scared people, and suddenly
everyone thought Facebook owns all you photos. But the [...] usually contained
the conditions, or the reasoning. So, for example, they had the "perpetual"
license to those works because it would have been difficult to securely eras
everything from every backup. But you still had/have the right to stop their
showing of your photos.

And they certainly never had the right to "perform" your works in the way that
copyright is usually turned into money. They cannot, for example, sell your
photos. Google never owned all the copyright in Harry Potter, even if the
manuscripts were all sent via Gmail. Otherwise I'm pretty sure we'd have heard
about it (It wouldn't be enforceable in court anyway, no more than some ToS
clause transferring your house and firstborn).

What they can do is data mining. So Google can show you ads that match your
inbox, and Facebook can train object recognition on your photos. But I'm not
even sure if they need a license for that–it's just reading, not performing.
They probably only need your consent for privacy reasons.

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ge96
I wonder if the same applies to offering free storage, it's insane to me how
One Drive offers 1 TB of free storage hahaha. Insane. But I could see the
benefit of being able to use that influx of data for their benefit whatever it
might be.

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candiodari
Photos contain private items, things like clothes. So they allow Google (and
Apple, and MS, and Amazon) to construct "real-world" metrics to brands and
vendors about which clothes they bought, maybe even with odds as to where they
were bought, and maybe base advertising decisions on that.

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wcummings
I dont know why they call google photos surprisingly popular, isnt it the
default in Android?

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kiallmacinnes
The article explicitly covers this?

