this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2026
374 points (99.0% liked)

Technology

83126 readers
3137 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] pHr34kY@lemmy.world 11 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

There are more barriers to digital sovereignty every day.

My wife hit the 15GB Google limit last week. Holy shit.

Her phone storage was full, so:

  • Photos were silently removed from the device and uploaded to Google Photos.
  • Once it was full, it locked her out of Google services. It even locked her email and took forms offline.
  • It then demanded payment to get access to her files.

Google Photos is ransomware by definition.

I ended up doing a takeout, and found that all the photos had the exif tags stripped and I had to re-merge them from a .json file that sat next to it. Otherwise they had no timestamp/location data and no other software would index it.

Fixing the mess required me to alter my photo import program (written in C) and use some scripts I found on github. It was a full weekend project.

I can see why a lot of people will just pay the ransom.

[โ€“] Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works 2 points 9 hours ago

Can you file a small claims suit against them? You could probably generate an invoice for $5k, make a claim and I don't know if they would even bother sending a lawyer.