I warned most of my family and friends this was going to happen when I de-Googled and set up Immich and they all said I was paranoid.

Why search for a doctor’s appointment when Google has access to all your calendar events. Why search for a party invite when it reads all your emails. And why search for a specific photo of you and your loved ones to create an image, when it sees all your photos.

They try very hard to sell this as something positive and not the privacy invasive nightmare it is.

Does it matter if you don't update? I imagine they already have it on their servers, which is where I imagine the photos are mostly processed.

I went back to Polaroid for my nudes.

Voiding my privacy, stealing my IP and opening me up to liabilities....and tis all legal... fuck all of you who gargled their balls and betrayed your own interests for what amounts to digital toys.

Does it matter what we do? There's definitely some family member, friend, colleague who has taken a picture of you and your likeness will be processed.

It's like people tagging you in Facebook pictures even if you don't have an account, but worse, because that was an active step. This is fully automated.

Pardon me, starts?

GrapheneOS works great for me. Not a lot you can do on stock android that you can’t do on GrapheneOS. I would highly recommend anyone looking for privacy to look into it. Very very easy to install. Just make sure you have a Pixel phone that is unlocked. I’ve been using it as my daily driver for two years now.

If you're able to manage a Docker container, you could consider Immich. It works great, has client apps for iOS and Android. Open Source. I've been using it for a few years now.

https://github.com/immich-app/immich

That's a terrible article though and seems quite click-baity, it's hard to say what's going on just based on that.
It also says

We’re talking Personal Intelligence, Google’s latest AI upgrade path which lets users opt-in to connecting Google apps to Gemini.
If it's opt-in, it's fine, as long as the user knows what exactly they are opting in for.

Time to finally finish setting up my immich instance properly.

If you install immich in your homelab, you can just transfer all the images off your device very easily with the immich app.

Probably the only way to keep them private from big tech. But the long term solution is to not use the official Android or Apple systems and to root your phone and install cyanogenmod or something similar without Google apps.

But that means some apps wont work at all, so thats the price to pay for that freedom.

Or you can just buy a separate camera and stop using your phone for that.

Alright, I already transfered the pics to my Immich a month ago anyway, time to delete my shit outright...

Time to invert the colors of some extra weird porn and stuff my Google drive to the brim.

I thought they always did this?

Decision to move to Immich on my own hardware years ago validated

It's also opt in. Although I'd be surprised if anyone commenting here is actually using google photos in the first place.

Timing is insane, i took out everything and put it on my NAS 2 weeks ago. Glad i removed everything.

tell me how to opt-out

Pandora's Tech Box opened long ago. It's already way too late.

Thanks, I hate it!

This is why I recommend using dedicated cameras that don't connect to the web. Well, one reason, the other reason is because dedicated cameras will always outperform phone cams.

An AI update that is 'opt in' and not 'opt out'?

Truly Shocking!