Google Photos is not FREE anymore… How Google is violating my social contract and what am I going to do about it...
We had a Deal and Google broke it.
On November 11th, 2020 I received an e-mail from Google saying that they are going to start charging for photos that I upload to Google Photos from June 1, 2021. (for usage beyond the free Google Drive capacity) All these years I had an unwritten social contract with Google. I allowed Google use one of my most valuable assets, “MyMemories” that holds a lot of personal details about me, to optimize their algorithms and learn about me, so that they can sell me to their advertisers, in return for using their Google Photos service for free. From next year they will charge me and continue to use my data for their benefit?
I have been using Google services to manage my photos since 2008 since I started using their product Picasa. Then they introduced Google+ and encouraged users to move from Picasa (which was mostly locally stored) to the Google+ albums (which is in the cloud). Unlimited photos upload, mobile auto-upload immediately caught my attention and ever since, I’ve been a very loyal customer of the online photo service offering from Google. I’ve been promoting it and I’ve got many people onboarded to the service.
To write this article, I went through my google photos which now has over 100,000 photos. I found the first photo that I auto-uploaded to Google on 8th November 2011, which is posted above. Since then, every phone that I used had google+/google Photos installed. That means, every photo that I’ve taken from that day onwards, from my mobile, is there in Google Photos. I can search for any photo within a matter of seconds. Using its advanced machine learning and image recognition algorithms, the features that it offered are un-parallelled.
Today, more than 4 trillion photos are stored in Google Photos, and every week 28 billion new photos and videos are uploaded. — The Verge
Unlimited storage with all the cutting-edge features for Free !!
I missed the plot. What could be Google’s Strategy
I knew that they are offering the service for Free in return for using my photos to optimize their machine learning/image recognition algorithms. What I missed was that once they reach their critical mass, they will drive their business towards a monopoly and start earning abnormal profits whilst using the user data, which they did throughout. I missed the plot. I missed the basic economics. In my view, their strategy would have been
- Offer a fantastic product for FREE, so that the adoption will be swift and will reach the tipping point quickly.
- Use customer data to continuously optimize the product. Using photos data for machine learning algorithms & image recognition and to enrich their maps data. Learn more about users and profile them better to improve their advertising platform.
- Destroy competition in this space so that by the time they start charging there won’t be any suitable substitutes for the user. One famous example was Flickr (My old Flickr stream), which I used to upload my photos before using Google+.
- Cross-promote their other products. (one time they moved to google photos to Google Drive and with the move, the google Drive revenue will skyrocket)
- Make the switching cost to the users so high (Due to the absence of an alternative and majority not having the technical know-how to download their valuable photos) so that majority of users end up starting to pay for the service. They are so clever that they didn't offer photos as a service. Instead, the user has to pay for storage, which is continuously growing as they upload more and more photos.
Who’s at Fault?
Is google at Fault on this one? NO. Not at all. They have made a business decision that totally makes sense. Within the respective government regulatory framework, they are doing their best to maximise their profit. Are they moral and ethical? Well, they are relative measures that cannot be enforced. And Google (And all other tech giants) have contributed immensely to improve peoples lives. Imagine not having google maps today. Imagine a web without search and going through an index to find what is required. Imagine maintaining a physical record of all our contacts or losing our contacts every time a phone breaks or gets lost.
Am I at fault? Not really… I weighed in the pros & cons and used the best solution available at the time for one of my major problems, ie. backing up my photos.
Should I do something about it? For sure.. We have become so dependant on these huge technology companies, even if they do something that is entirely unfair by the users, still the users will have to continue to use their services. You can get a glimpse of their power when you watch their senate hearings.
What am I going to do? Diversify.
What can I do about it? I am going to diversify my risk. If one goes bad, the impact to me will be less. And it will encourage substitutes for these mammoth products.
- Participate in and promote the open-source community and try to use open-source as much as possible.
I’ve been using Linux (Open Source) as my main driver for personal use (I use Arch btw 😉 ) for a few years now. And windows for office. . . And I try my best to use as many open-source software as possible. Except for Adobe photoshop/illustrator (GIMP and Inkspace are still not as good as their adobe counterparts) and Microsoft Office suite(Libre Office and Free Office will be perfectly fine if you’re not using advanced excel), everything else can be done faster and better in Linux. Start with Mint or Ubuntu if you’re new. (If you’re sceptical of using Linux as the main driver, install in a risk-free virtual machine for a few days and see. Instructions here).
2. Diversify my exposure
In today's world, it is foolish and impossible to stop using all services offered by evil companies. But it is possible to start using different services for different purposes, not putting all eggs in one basket. Below are some of the services that I have shortlisted.
Search: I moved to duckduckgo. (Link >> How to change your default search engine)
Browser: In my windows machine, I’ve been using both Firefox(Open Source) and Chrome. I’m totally moving to Firefox. In my Linux machine, I use Chromium (Open Source), Firefox and Qute (Open Source).
Social Media: I’ve reduced my activity level main Stream Social Media Platforms to a greater extent. And I don't have them installed on my phone so that they can’t track my every move. (Eg. Reach out to a friend). If you’re still not sure about reducing your activity levels, watch Social Dilemma. (Yes I know.. I am generating more traffic to google 😉 but to enlighten its users)
Messaging: Unfortunately there is no proper substitute for Whats App yet. Again, due to critical mass.
Phone: No proper alternative for Android yet. Apple IOS is too closed and doesn’t allow me to play with the system much.
Photos: Good old Local Backup. I did always maintained a local back up of the originally quality pictures. Two other options are Amazon Prime which offers unlimited photo backup for AUD 59 a year OR using Microsoft 365 Family plan which offers 1TB storage for ( AUD 129 for 6 users)
Storage: Box.com, Mega (Offers 50GB of free capacity), Microsoft Onedrive
Mail: I am already using both Google’s Gmail as my primary and Microsoft’s outlook as my secondary. I am going to switch to Microsoft as my primary. I considered spinning my own mail server in the cloud (using Next Cloud, but the administrative burden will be too much.
Conclusion
To be clear… I am not complaining about their behaviour. I will never be able to reduce my exposure to these tech Giants zero. And one would be naive to not use these services to improve his/her life. However, one should be aware of the potential pitfalls and should try to reduce the risks as much as possible.