HACKER Q&A
📣 applgo443

Would you pay for a fully encrypted Google Photos alternative?


Would you pay for a fully encrypted google photos alternative?

1. You could unlock it with your regular web2 way (Gmail, email-password, etc) or use your crypto wallet (==> complete privacy).

2. Photos would be encrypted and then distributed over IPFS --> No one except you can ever recover them

3. There'd be on-device ML features so that you could still get the useful features - search by person's face, search for a picture of church, etc.

What would tip you to leave Google Photos in favor of such a product?

  👤 hammyhavoc Accepted Answer ✓
No. I would rather support an open source project and actually have the data myself on a server that I control.
👤 jacobmischka
Honestly, I would absolutely not give money or my data to anyone who mentions signing in with with crypto wallet (?) being completely private compared to "regular web2".
👤 willcipriano
The main thing about Google Photos is they won't lose my photos. How do I know you won't lose my photos?
👤 pedalpete
I like where you're going with this, and I was amazed to hear how inexpensive IPFS storage could be (or other distributed storage) could be.

I've been looking at storing users GPS data, but more than just encrypted for privacy, I think it is important to think about how you give other apps access to the data.

The approach I'm researching is how to manage an access control list for such an environment.

I'd think it would be the same for photos. I want my photos stored somewhere, and possibly with other people and apps. So picture the next Instagram, but rather than Insta storing the photos, they have access to my photos, when the next app comes along, I don't "re-upload" or start fresh, I give them access to my library (or portion of my library, but that's probably a later step).

Any thoughts on that?

👤 brudgers
How are you going to manage problematic content such as child pornography and deliberate copyright infringement?

If you can't do that, then effort and money put into moving my content there would just be wasted because the hard problems of managing problematic content is why there are not a bunch of services like the one you are proposing. The hard problems aren't technical, they are the economic incentives of bad actors.

Good luck.

👤 ssss11
I like ideas such as this however for important personal data how can I trust IPFS? How do I know that the encryption used won’t be cracked?

Also when you store it fully encrypted how can I trust that that is the case, all I see (I assume) is my data once I provide the correct password.

👤 tegiddrone
Yes. IPFS would be cool but maybe some other pluggable datastore. You thinking a desktop app or mobile?

Somewhat related: is there a photo album app that supports region annotations in some non propriatary way?

👤 ggcdn
Nope, not interested in paying for photo storage, although I do use it currently because it’s free and convenient.

Would rather just operate in Web 1.0 and download to my computer every few months.

👤 errantmind
Honestly, no, I just sync my files with syncthing and don't care much for nostalgia.

Don't let that stop you though, I'm probably not your target market.

👤 runjake
Probably not, no.

I’d have to see the implementation, the privacy policy, and the exportability of my photos and metadata before I’d even consider it.

👤 cercatrova
No, Google Photos works well enough for me, is on every device I need, and "just works." Plus, it's free.
👤 throwaway81523
No, I'd rather use my own machines, and anyway I don't have the network bandwidth to upload photos.
👤 yuppie_scum
Sounds like a pain. No.
👤 znpy
No.

I already paid for the hardware to run nextcloud at home.

I don't need anything else.

👤 throwawayvibes
Absolutely not.
👤 ipunchghosts
Yes
👤 freetinker
Yes, 100%.