There are more barriers to digital sovereignty every day.
My wife hit the 15GB Google limit last week. Holy shit.
Her phone storage was full, so:
Photos were silently removed from the device and uploaded to Google Photos.
Once it was full, it locked her out of Google services. It even locked her email and took forms offline.
It then demanded payment to get access to her files.
Google Photos is ransomware by definition.
I ended up doing a takeout, and found that all the photos had the exif tags stripped and I had to re-merge them from a .json file that sat next to it. Otherwise they had no timestamp/location data and no other software would index it.
Fixing the mess required me to alter my photo import program (written in C) and use some scripts I found on github. It was a full weekend project.
I can see why a lot of people will just pay the ransom.
Can you file a small claims suit against them? You could probably generate an invoice for $5k, make a claim and I don’t know if they would even bother sending a lawyer.
There are more barriers to digital sovereignty every day.
My wife hit the 15GB Google limit last week. Holy shit.
Her phone storage was full, so:
Google Photos is ransomware by definition.
I ended up doing a takeout, and found that all the photos had the exif tags stripped and I had to re-merge them from a .json file that sat next to it. Otherwise they had no timestamp/location data and no other software would index it.
Fixing the mess required me to alter my photo import program (written in C) and use some scripts I found on github. It was a full weekend project.
I can see why a lot of people will just pay the ransom.
Can you file a small claims suit against them? You could probably generate an invoice for $5k, make a claim and I don’t know if they would even bother sending a lawyer.