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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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Replying to

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.

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eater "cum carbonation"

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wait what how

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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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I think Simple Mobile Tools used to use Apache 2 but they started switching everything to GPLv3 as a way of trying to monetize it. They don't seem to understand that the license applies to them for code contributed by people to the project. Not really worth fretting about it.

11:14 PM · Jul 29, 2021Twitter Web App

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Anyway typical example of how GPLv3/AGPLv3 is used in the real world. Often used because it's a very restrictive license still considered by many people to be 'free'. It's usually done for dual licensing schemes, like this, combined with CLA for contributors to it (missing here).

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It's still a decent app. The migration away from Apache 2 to GPL is why we aren't going to consider bundling any of these in GrapheneOS. They also have some nonsense security theater app locking stuff and like using the legacy Camera 1 API, etc. Still the least bad gallery app...

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eater "cum carbonation"

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wouldn't GPLv3 disallow them from tainting it? xD