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 is *really* concerning to me because it's literally impossible to *not* use Google Lens. If I don't like the album feature—fine, I won't create albums. But Lens is a large button in a place you're likely to hit it by accident often. I discovered it by accidentally tapping it
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If I look in my Google Activity, I find many cryptic entries under "Searched with Google Lens" — seemingly one for every time I pressed the button today, *as well as one for yesterday, when I hadn't realized I'd pressed it*. But *what* was uploaded? It doesn't say. No way to ask.
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Google seems to think the important question is what data is *retained*. They have elaborate written policies about what is done with retained data & detailed logs of retained data. Google considers information *transmitted*, but not retained, unimportant.
I disagree completely.
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You should try a decent gallery app instead of the offline parts of the Google Photos client. This is fine:
f-droid.org/en/packages/co
The photo editor in the open source variant of it is extremely barebones though. Paid variant on the Play Store uses a fancy proprietary library.
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Is the organization "Simple Mobile Tools" on the Play store the same one that created this F Droid thing?
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F-Droid is an alternative to the Play Store with their own repository of open source apps.
Simple Gallery Pro is open source but the Play Store variant is a paid app replacing the open source editor for a proprietary one. It's actually a GPL violation but they don't understand.
They decided to give up on making a nice open source photo editor and instead bundled a proprietary library for it. They have an open source build variant with the barebones open source photo editor so F-Droid uses that variant. The Play Store app uses the proprietary library.
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So, if you want it for free, you can install it from F-Droid. It's also a perfectly good paid app if you don't mind paying a dollar for it.
I do think they should probably consider not violating the GPL by requiring contributors to give them a permissive license though...
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Thanks for explaining. I usually stick to play store apps because I want the auto update behavior.
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F-Droid notifies of you of updates but can't install them without you.
Android 12 is improving this and it will be possible for apps to automatically update apps they've installed themselves as long as those apps are API 29+. Usual key pinning + downgrade protection applies.
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