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If your photos live on the service's servers, they are no longer yours. That's intrinsic to the nature of software as a service. I realize that makes me sound crazy, but after years of reflecting on software, privacy, data ownership, and decentralization, I have not been able to avoid the conclusion that Stallman was basically right. If your data lives in a cluster with a bunch of other people's, it's a tempting target, both to legitimate businesses and to outright theft. It's only a matter of time before someone gets it, as the constant parade of breaches and data sharing scandals show, and once it's out there you can't undo it. I have speculated that open source services that are easily self-hosted (start the installer, enter a domain name, and pick a cloud provider) might be a passable answer to the desire to have both accessibility, shareability, and independence. Funding their development is trickier, obviously. |
They very easily could be, if the service wanted to write it's contract of adhesion to allow the user meaningful control over the scope of how the service can use the photos.
But conventional wisdom believes there is less money in that route, and nobody in "tech" is willing to settle for less than maximum exploitation of assets.