Google Photos: Is it good or bad for your privacy?

Google photos is just a great new service that upload all your photos and videos for free but with the launch of this service there arise a big question of your privacy. Is Google Photos just a great service or a massive plot to steal your private data and harm your privacy? Let us find.

Google photos allows you to automatically upload all your photos and videos to the cloud for free and without a limit on storage though there are other limitations like photos cannot be bigger than 16 megapixels and will be automatically downscale if they are and videos must be of 1080p resolution or lower. Google photos is available as an app on Android and iOS or you can use it through your web browser. It provide you with a single location for all your photos that are accessible from all of your devices. There are lot of services trying to solve the same problem but Google photos has some major advantages over the competition and the pros are: It is free, unlimited and really good at organizing photos, making them searchable and curating them that means you can search by location, by date, by event or by using varieties of keywords. For example: type mountain into the search box and you will see all your photos with the mountain in them. The photos assistant also create highlight videos and gifts for you to share taking the pain of editing things together by yourself. This is not a new idea but as with so many things Google’s a little better at doing it than most to the competition.

Now you’ve probably heard the advantage of the Google photos, so let us start cons. Google is an advertising company that’s how they make most of their money but more specifically they are the search advertising company and that means to be effective they need to know as much about you as possible so that they can deliver to you relevant ads and Google is exceptionally good at doing that. There used to be time when Google searches and their ads were not relevant. Google used to display random ads on every searches but as the company grows there is a dramatic improvement in Google’s Advertising, this all is possible by the knowledge of Google about its searchers. So, they give us these great free products. Nobody gives you better free products then Google but they come at a price i.e. they take our data and use it.

Using Google photos really come down to whether or not we trust Google with our data. Google is going to know where you took the photos, who you took the photos with and what were you doing in the photos. To trust Google with all these data is really hard because they legally say that they basically can do whatever they want with those photos you upload. A product like Google Photos falls into the Google Terms of Service that means when you upload your photos you’re having the tech giant license to host, store, reproduce, modify, create, derivative works, communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute those photos. There you go Google believes that they can basically do anything they want with these photos. The question is not about whether to trust Google or not but the question are we web savvy enough or are we privacy savvy enough to be conscious about what we put online.