This is one of those “OMG self-inflicted injury!” scenarios that could happen to any of us. Joe Cadillic sends along this report by Jason Koebler:
In our brief time on this rock, even the best of us are likely to own ourselves from time to time. As some of my colleagues would be happy to tell you, I own myself more often than most, most recently because I wanted to see a video of my friend’s new puppy.
I recently went to a concert, had a few beers, and woke up with a hangover and a notification that my phone had successfully uploaded 15,000 images and videos to Google Photos. Here’s what happened.
When Google Photos was announced in 2015, I downloaded it. I had no intention of giving every photo I’ve ever taken to Google—which categorizes them, runs them through image recognition and facial recognition algorithms, makes weird algorithmic slideshows out of them, and adds them to its massive photo database—but I wanted to try it out in any case. I quickly realized it was not for me, but I did not delete the app.
Read more on Motherboard. Here’s one sentence that is definitely worth remembering:
You cannot use Google Photos on iOS—even to view photos that have been shared with you—without granting the app access to all the photos on your phone.
(And yes, I immediately checked to see if I had Google Photos on my system. Did you?)