September 26, 2022

16:05

Do you know why your mobile phone has a camera? There are two major reasons:

  1. Engagement; whenever you share a snapshot, it becomes a vehicle on which ads can ride piggy back into your social circle.
  2. Upselling to cloudservices; pictures are quick to take, may carry sentimental value and, most importantly, burn through internal storage like wildfire. Most aren’t worthy of getting printed and framed, but making it easy for people to connect with their inner compulsive hoarder, also makes them slowly lock themselves into the platform that provides external storage.

Speaking of free storage and lock-in effects. Looks like Google decided that enough is enough and to indiscriminately prune Drive by running a lossy image compression algorithm on decade old pictures, ruining mementos of precious moments and upsetting users in the process. Really, no sympathy there. Letting Silicon Valley the gatekeeper of your data means, your data will (eventually) work against you. Always has been, always will be.