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by akho 354 days ago
I understand what e2ee is, thank you. I just don't think it’s justified for self-hosted photo servers.

E. g., “Any operations / transformations” includes facial recognition, CLIP embeddings, &c; you want to run this on the server, overnight, and to be able to re-run at a later date when new models become available. Under e2ee, that’s a round-trip through a client device at every model update. So that’s a significant downside, for no important upsides in the case when you and your family are the only users.
1 comments
prophesi 354 days ago
I was explaining why e2ee has important upsides, not how e2ee works. With Ente (and I think Immich as well), facial recognition and generating new CLIP embeddings are done on-device[0], usually right when the photo is taken / before they're uploaded to the server.

[0] https://ente.io/blog/image-search-with-clip-ggml/

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akho 353 days ago
Immich does it on the server.

What happens if there’s a new, better model? You’d need to re-download, decrypt, and run inference on all your past media, which is in terabytes for many.

I understand the benefit of e2ee in a situation where there is no trust between user and admin. In personal self-hosting, that’s the same person (or family), and the upsides are not as relevant. The downsides (possibility of data loss for, e. g., kids who are not very good with passwords/keys; difficulties with updating models / thumbs; …) remain important, and outweigh the benefits, even assuming the e2ee is implemented well.

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prophesi 353 days ago
You do you, but the trust is beyond just admin and users. And family photos are treated as treasures. Data loss is a fair point, but if you're self-hosting a photos app I imagine server/db backups are part of your routine. Account recovery is all that's needed to recover lost photos from there. Well, unless your VPS is compromised in a manner of data loss for longer than you wished before your backups ran, in which case it's still better that such sensitive info was e2ee'd.

edit: also feel like I'm echoing the classic dropbox comment, but self-hosting in a sane and secure manner is harder than it's made out to be. It needs to be taken seriously.

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akho 353 days ago
e2ee prevents account recovery.
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prophesi 353 days ago
People have found decent solutions for that. Proton's is essentially a backup password/phrase or a file you keep safe. Not as simple as a magic link, and could still lose your backup phrase/file, but alas. Security is always a compromise on convenience.

[0] https://proton.me/blog/data-recovery-end-to-end-encryption

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