This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
That's a terrible article though and seems quite click-baity, it's hard to say what's going on just based on that.
It also says
We’re talking Personal Intelligence, Google’s latest AI upgrade path which lets users opt-in to connecting Google apps to Gemini.
If it's opt-in, it's fine, as long as the user knows what exactly they are opting in for.
The way they are doing it is kind of sketchy though. They are replacing the old search functionality with Gemini and now if you click the search icon in Google photos it immediately pops up asking you to pick your own face. There's no option to skip this step, though you can still revert to the old search for now.
The creepy part is that when they ask you to select your face, it's pretty clear they've already figured it out, because it's the first face they show you.
Even when they say it's optional, it's never actually optional. They are always enabling it in the background and just preventing you from seeing that.
But even if they actually did use an opt-in system properly, they would still only do that for like 6 months, and then in the next update you'd be forced to use it. And who can stop them? There is no alternative.
Except anyone else that has ever taken my picture can opt-in for me, and I have no way of knowing if they did or not.
If you install immich in your homelab, you can just transfer all the images off your device very easily with the immich app.
Probably the only way to keep them private from big tech. But the long term solution is to not use the official Android or Apple systems and to root your phone and install cyanogenmod or something similar without Google apps.
But that means some apps wont work at all, so thats the price to pay for that freedom.
Or you can just buy a separate camera and stop using your phone for that.
Timing is insane, i took out everything and put it on my NAS 2 weeks ago. Glad i removed everything.
It's also opt in. Although I'd be surprised if anyone commenting here is actually using google photos in the first place.
There'll be quite a few of us. I have no idea of the actual demographics or whatever, but a lot of people are here just because they got shafted by reddit one too many times.
Do we really trust Google's word though? They already use machine learning on your photos to support the search feature
I thought they always did this?
Decision to move to Immich on my own hardware years ago validated
Because fuck you that's why
Thanks, I hate it!
This is why I recommend using dedicated cameras that don't connect to the web. Well, one reason, the other reason is because dedicated cameras will always outperform phone cams.
