Huh. Google Photos on my phone now had a feature called "Lens" that lets me select, copy or translate text from a photo.
That's pretty neat.
Is this… is this covertly sending a copy of the photo to a Google server without telling me
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So here's the thing. I do not consent to Google uploading my photos or microphone recordings to their servers. *Ever*. Under *any circumstances* (attaching files to a message on a Google service, like Hangouts, is the obvious, only exception).
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Replying to @mcclure111
Lens has a mix of offline and online features but it's primarily an online service. It does have the ability to do OCR and translations without their service, at least if you set it up that way.
There's local OCR without involving Lens. Try selecting text in recent apps instead.
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Google Photos makes it consistently *really* hard to tell if they're uploading things behind your back or not. For example, creating an album uploads all the photos, which came as a surprise to me the first time I made one.
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Replying to @mcclure111
Oh incidentally: Here's EXACTLY what happened.
*Click "add photo to new album"*
*It says, "Uploading"*
*I say, "Cancel"*
*IT UPLOADS ANYWAY*
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What about Lens? It's impossible to tell. If you look in settings, there's no off switch, but it says activity is saved "if you have Web and App Activity" turned on. What is that? It's not on this screen. There is a "Learn More" link which says absolutely nothing relevant.
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This might seem like a silly question but I genuinely don't understand-are the photos I have on Google photos not already on a Google server? I always assumed they were
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Google Photos is a service they offer and it has apps available as clients for the service. Those apps have some offline functionality but they aren't designed as standalone local photos apps. Similar to how you can use their Gmail app with other mail accounts elsewhere.
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It's possible to use the Google Photos app without using the service but it's primarily the client for the service so it should be assumed that almost everything is based on the service. If bandwidth and cloud storage were unlimited, it wouldn't have as much local functionality.