Is Google Photos THAT bad for privacy?

pvreq:

@ Could you elaborate, why you think, “it should be ok” to use Google Photos, “if you don’t expect to be investigated by law enforcement” - given OP clearly asked for a honest opinion about this product from privacy perspective?

I was going through the common threats that you’d expect from a cloud provider, the main one being the provider itself accessing your photos, which is why I said you need to trust Google not to misuse your photos.

Security breaches are another possible threat, which are mitigated by E2EE, but it’s something that I wouldn’t be too worried about since Google has good security in its cloud infrastructure.

Access by law enforcement is another major threat that non-E2EE services are vulnerable to, so I elaborated their policy of requiring a warrant, assuming you trust Google. The “it should be ok” was specifically in reference to this point not as a whole.

I was trying to have a nuanced rundown of the major threats people are generally worried about and what I think the likelihood of having to deal with them is. Obviously it’s best to have an E2EE provider, and that would mitigate all of these.

As others brought up, they do scan your photos which is a concern, if one of your photos wrongly triggers their system then that’s going to be a big problem.