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Google is Not a Friend: Google Photos Corrupted, Highlighting Dangers of Clown Computing
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
HOW many times does Google need to burn its so-called 'users' (used by Google) before they learn to just avoid Google?
"With a budget like Google's and salaries so astronomically high, shouldn't this have been prevented?"A couple of nights ago I saw the report about Google's user data getting corrupted. I took note to say "Google Photos Corrupted, Highlighting Dangers of Clown Computing" and later I saw more reports to the same effect. To quote the latter one: "According to those affected, the corruption persists when downloading the image. This apparently applies to both individual downloads and when using Google Takeout. The original copies of pictures do not appear to be impacted, but the edited ones are what appear in the Google Photos apps. Dozens of reports and examples show near-identical instances of this issue. The problem looks to have resided for some in the last day, but others are still affected. As such, it’s more than likely that there is a solution on Google’s end for this."
With a budget like Google's and salaries so astronomically high, shouldn't this have been prevented? As I explain in the video above, some of the world's most famous storage gurus are employed by Google.
In my video, the negligence is explained a bit further. And the lessons learned here are that even large companies cannot be relied upon with your data; in fact, they don't value this data and won't make a special effort to protect or restore it; previously, with Picasa, they just simply tore down people's software tools and data, purely for business reasons.
There are reasons other than data integrity not to give Google any of your data. One important aspect is -- suffice to say -- privacy. See Leaking Passwords through the Spellchecker from Schneier on Security. It was published earlier this week and said: "The solution is to only use the spellchecker options that keep the data on your computer—and don’t send it into the cloud..."
Microsoft and Google are both building databases with people's passwords. Is that even legal??? As somebody else noted this week, Google Analytics isn't legal. To quote: "Although Google says that Google Analytics 4 solves the issue, the Austrian and Danish DPAs reject Google’s point of view."
It's like they're above the law; in fact fines don't scare them. It's just the 'price' of abusing people.
"They really don't value people's memories."Legality aside, there are practical reasons to avoid outsourcing. As one article put it: "It’s easy to just snap photos of all your special memories and keep them uploaded to the cloud for safekeeping, never worrying about them. But what happens when they’re not as safe as you’d assumed? This is what some Google Photos users are experiencing, posting to Google support that their older images have become corrupted." And they didn't even notify users. There are no backups. They really don't value people's memories. The Google 'Gulag' is so careless and incompetent, going 'full Stalin' on people's photos (Stalin was notorious for deleting or sanitising photographs).
Clown computing is a huge mistake.
Keeping one's photos in one's own turf is both doable and encouraged. It's affordable as well. The entry barrier is not as high as people are led to believe and there's no service shutdown unless one chooses to shut down one's own album/s. As for data loss, regular backups help. Don't let some greedy, unaccountable corporations handle them. Microsoft lost customers' valuable information many times before (e.g. Danger Sidekick). Live and learn, stop repeating mistakes. ⬆