[Barrin92]

what happened to the guy was awful but in general, don't ever store medical correspondence on Google cloud or send it over email or messengers. Here in the EU and I would be surprised if it's different in the US there's dedicated apps for telemedicine which are regulated like medical devices, so there's confidentiality, no storage or scanning of vieo or audio, and so on. Sucks but you can't really treat any other services as secure or private.

[cozzyd]

right but most people take pictures with their phones nowadays, which might automatically backup up to google photos.

[Waterluvian]

And the supermajority of users of this set of systems and features are entirely technically unaware of how to micromanage it.

To them, they have a phone that backs up to the cloud.

[wholinator2]

I figure it's probably not typical but I disable every single piece of tracking possible and disallow any external cloud storage on every device I have. I just don't actually have a need to give Google thousands of my photographs and access to every piece of my personal history. The benefit would be marginal and the cost is unlikely but potentially catastrophic. (And seemingly more likely every year). Every new device I get I go through every setting and turn off all the new bullshit they've put in to steal my privacy, because they do constantly add to the attack surface.

[xeromal]

Sounds like there almost needs to be an incognito mode for cameras.

[themacguffinman]

There is. The Android camera app has a button on the top-right corner that lets you quickly switch between saving to "photo storage" or "locked folder". If you pick "locked folder", it saves it to a special folder that isn't backed up to the cloud and requires a screen lock to open.

[cozzyd]

that does sound like a useful feature for uses like this, but I've never heard of it (and many phones probably come with different camera apps provided by the manufacturer... I have no idea if the Camera app on my Motorola phone is the stock one or not...).

[afandian]

I don’t trust anyone with health data, honestly. Two examples from the UK:

Babylon data breach for UK GPs:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23471347

Palantir getting its teeth into the NHS:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56183785

Next time I need a doctors appointment I’ll do my best to make it in-person.

[kodt]

It sounds like a secure platform was likely used to send it to the doctor but the photos were taken on a phone and auto backed up to Google Photos and also texted to his wife’s iPhone.