<story><title>Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that&apos;s changing</title><url>https://keyt.com/news/money-and-business/2020/11/12/google-photos-hooked-users-with-free-unlimited-storage-now-thats-changing/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>j7ake</author><text>Is google mining photos for profit?&lt;p&gt;What kind of profits are there to mine data in google photos?</text></item><item><author>elmo2you</author><text>&amp;gt; To be fair, Google&amp;#x27;s pricing on storage is more than reasonable&lt;p&gt;That probably depends, on whether you factor in the profit Google makes from mining your data. That should be subtracted from their operating costs and only then compared to what they charge for the storage. My guess is that they&amp;#x27;ll make quite a killing on the thing, as a whole.&lt;p&gt;Even besides the morally questionable aspects (of the data mining), considering their position and leverage they might very well be slapped with some anti-trust rulings in the future.&lt;p&gt;Unlikely to happen in the US, since the meaning of anti-trust there has been systematically eroded and limited to where it has become all but a complete farce (compared to its original meaning&amp;#x2F;intentions). However, that&amp;#x27;s what you get when large corporations can pump vast amounts of money into politics, as if they were a voting citizen. But there is still some hope in other places. Either way, it shouldn&amp;#x27;t take rocket science to see how Google has a tremendous (unfair) advantage over any competition in this regard (which is what anti-trust really is about; not just avoiding&amp;#x2F;regulating absolute monopolies).</text></item><item><author>nicoburns</author><text>To be fair, Google&amp;#x27;s pricing on storage is more than reasonable. I pay £2.50&amp;#x2F;month for 200gb of storage which more than covers my lifetimes worth of photos so far (in full res with a fair few RAW photos in there too).&lt;p&gt;And they&amp;#x27;re not deleting any photos that users already uploaded. I think Google deserve all the criticism they get for shutting down services. But this one seems to have been handled quite well.</text></item><item><author>part1of2</author><text>&amp;gt; Anil Sabharwal, Google Photos’ then-head, said in a blog post when the service launched in 2015. “And when we say a lifetime of memories, we really mean it.”&lt;p&gt;Most of Google’s product strategy has been bait &amp;amp; switch, and I saythat with all due to respect to the engineers. It’s the leaders who make these decisions</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>freeflight</author><text>I would be very surprised if Google is not data mining everything they can, it&amp;#x27;s always been their main business model.&lt;p&gt;With the photos it could be as simple as merging the meta data from those photos together with a user profile for even more targeted advertising.&lt;p&gt;Somebody making a lot of photos of certain things might be more interested in buying these things.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m pretty sure the real data wizards can think of quite a few more, and better, ways to monetize such data, particularly at the scale that Google is collecting it.</text></comment>
<story><title>Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that&apos;s changing</title><url>https://keyt.com/news/money-and-business/2020/11/12/google-photos-hooked-users-with-free-unlimited-storage-now-thats-changing/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>j7ake</author><text>Is google mining photos for profit?&lt;p&gt;What kind of profits are there to mine data in google photos?</text></item><item><author>elmo2you</author><text>&amp;gt; To be fair, Google&amp;#x27;s pricing on storage is more than reasonable&lt;p&gt;That probably depends, on whether you factor in the profit Google makes from mining your data. That should be subtracted from their operating costs and only then compared to what they charge for the storage. My guess is that they&amp;#x27;ll make quite a killing on the thing, as a whole.&lt;p&gt;Even besides the morally questionable aspects (of the data mining), considering their position and leverage they might very well be slapped with some anti-trust rulings in the future.&lt;p&gt;Unlikely to happen in the US, since the meaning of anti-trust there has been systematically eroded and limited to where it has become all but a complete farce (compared to its original meaning&amp;#x2F;intentions). However, that&amp;#x27;s what you get when large corporations can pump vast amounts of money into politics, as if they were a voting citizen. But there is still some hope in other places. Either way, it shouldn&amp;#x27;t take rocket science to see how Google has a tremendous (unfair) advantage over any competition in this regard (which is what anti-trust really is about; not just avoiding&amp;#x2F;regulating absolute monopolies).</text></item><item><author>nicoburns</author><text>To be fair, Google&amp;#x27;s pricing on storage is more than reasonable. I pay £2.50&amp;#x2F;month for 200gb of storage which more than covers my lifetimes worth of photos so far (in full res with a fair few RAW photos in there too).&lt;p&gt;And they&amp;#x27;re not deleting any photos that users already uploaded. I think Google deserve all the criticism they get for shutting down services. But this one seems to have been handled quite well.</text></item><item><author>part1of2</author><text>&amp;gt; Anil Sabharwal, Google Photos’ then-head, said in a blog post when the service launched in 2015. “And when we say a lifetime of memories, we really mean it.”&lt;p&gt;Most of Google’s product strategy has been bait &amp;amp; switch, and I saythat with all due to respect to the engineers. It’s the leaders who make these decisions</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>autoexec</author><text>&amp;gt; What kind of profits are there to mine data in google photos?&lt;p&gt;Are you asking why data is valuable or what data can be found in photos? They could pour over every detail captured on camera taking note of locations, any products seen the background of your shots, the types of clothes you and your family&amp;#x2F;friends wear, who wears or doesn&amp;#x27;t wear makeup, etc) then they can use facial recognition to identify everyone in your pictures (photographed intentionally or not) and determine their relationships to you and each other then update everyone&amp;#x27;s dossiers with whatever new information they managed to gather from your pics.&lt;p&gt;Or they could just jerk off to your nudes. Who knows.</text></comment>