The unbearable convenience of Google and Facebook

Not even a deep-seated antipathy for tech giants can ween you off them, Shaun Prescott writes.

Not long ago I stumbled across Google Photos in my web browser. When I dared click on it, what unfolded was an archive of thousands of my smartphone photos – all ‘online’ and not, as I had thought, secured on my smartphone. My initial shock soon gave way to a kind of fatefulness – I must have volunteered to use Google Photos at some point in the past, whether deliberately or otherwise. And yet, I couldn’t remember when. Given my general antipathy towards cloud services, and especially Google cloud services, I couldn’t imagine ever willingly sending pictures of my kids into the clutches of Google. And yet...

Google Photos is a cloud service that, once opted into (whether deliberately or not!), will automatically pull smartphone photos into the cloud. The benefit of Photos over Drive or Dropbox is that you can immediately view these photos at any time from any machine, providing you’re logged into your Google account. And the presentation is actually pretty cool: you can search by several default categories including People, Pets and Things, with Google’s facial recognition tech able to determine who is in the photo (with a little bit of your help, if you happen to have grown a beard and then shaved it off at any point). These photos are private by default, but can be shared with other Google account holders. The service also automatically creates collages and photo sets, and incessantly reminds you to look at them.

So it’s a pretty irresistible feature, in other words, which somewhat allayed my anxieties about forgetting that I’d even opted into it. That’s how Google gets you: it offers free, immensely useful software that becomes embedded in your life, then it profits from it in mysterious ways, buried in

T&C documents of Tolstoy-like proportions. And besides, we tell ourselves, Google is one of the biggest tech companies in the world – surely a data breach is impossible?

Well, that depends. Last month, in an email advising select users about a technical issue with Google Photos, the company quietly confided that some Google Photos videos were being “exported to unrelated users’ archives”. In other words, the videos were appearing in other people’s accounts. This happened during a brief period of time – November 21 and 25 last year, specifically – but if you’ve any misgivings about using Google Photos, this will likely ring alarm bells.

It did for me, and yet, last week, having acquired a new smartphone, I was faced with the question of what to do with all my photos. My old phone was so incapacitated that manually dragging them onto a hard drive or desktop wasn’t an option. But then I remembered: It doesn’t matter! Google has been pilfering my photos this whole time.

I don’t like giving my personal information or memories to Google, any more than I like to have anything to do with Facebook. But during the bushfire crisis last month, being a Blue Mountains resident, I signed up in order to join some community watch groups. What I found was enormously impressive: a handful of round-theclock unpaid moderators fighting an uphill battle against Facebook’s woeful display algorithms, fighting unpredictable forces in order to make sure people saw up-to-date information first. It’s an objectively terrible platform, and yet everyone is using it – it hosts the kind of interaction and information you can’t get anywhere else. So I’m back on Facebook again, and I hate it, and yet... what other option do I (do we) have, short of armed insurrection, or, uh, everyone moving to a better platform?