The other question is, what is your cloud provider going to intentionally do with your data without your consent.

define "your data" because from their perspective, the data they collected watching you through a window, is their data.

> The only question is, is your cloud provider less likely to make mistakes with your data than you are?

No, the second question, which is a multiplier of the first, is how catastrophic the mistakes can be. Google _can_ accidentally do much worse things with your data, but it probably much less likely to make mistakes with it in the first place.

Yep. If I screw up, then the worst case is pretty much that the data is gone.

If the cloud provider screws up, then the worst case is that my video goes viral and lives on the internet forever.

It isn't hard to imagine some troll finding he got some embarrassing video via takeout and putting it up on reddit for everyone to see.

Other worst cases - you leave the firewall wide open, and some script kiddies steal the photos, replace them with kiddie porn and refer you to the police.

This is a risk regardless of where I store my data. If I have a machine with any local storage of any kind at all, then someone could break in and store stuff there.

So this is not a differentiator between storing your own data in the cloud and locally.

Just encrypt your data before putting it onto somebody else's computer a.k.a. the cloud.

Exactly, the solution of the problem is to only give encrypted data to cloud companies. This way they cannot collect any additional information from your data.

And when the average user forgets their password?

Then their data is gone. Now you just have to figure out what's worse for you. Somebody else getting your data or losing your data and you know whether encryption is for you.

Put the password in escrow somewhere when you start.

How do you secure the escrow?

Don’t be the average user.

That’s a very dismissive attitude. If you want to make the world a better place, you have to accommodate the average user; One can’t say, “you’re not smart enough for our service.”

If you’re serious about the security of your data, you need to know how to pick a password you will remember. There are things in this world that we ask of average people that are far more difficult. In 2020, picking and remembering a password should be table stakes at this point. It’s not 1997 anymore.

The key word there is “if.” Most people don’t care about the security because they’re unaware of the risks involved. Stories like this blow over in a week or two.

Most people don’t want to lose their stuff because they forget a password. That’s why unencrypted data and password resets are a thing.

What we as tech people should be doing is educating and helping those people. Set your family up with a NAS for local backup and have it mirror to, say, Backblaze. Set your parents/grandparents up with a password manager. Etc.

Easier said than done:

- If you share something, you need a way to share the key

- Things like a truecrypt drive work poorly with file sync clients

For most people, self hosting their own data isn’t even an option. For the subset of privacy concerned people who have the technological knowledge to self host, making mistakes with their data is not “orders of magnitude less likely”.

> For most people, self hosting their own data isn’t even an option.

I'm trying hard to invalidate this with PhotoStructure. My goal is to be installable and usable by even my least-computer-savvy family members.

Although there are desktop installers, users can move their library to a NAS, rPI, oDroid, NUC or a VM in the cloud--anything that can host 64-bit docker images--but only if they want to. Everything in your library works cross-platform because I didn't want to be tied down to any OS or hardware.

How are photos added to the library? I had a quick look through the PhotoStructure website and it looks interesting, but I haven't seen this answered. For me the appeal of Google Photos is that all my phone's photos get uploaded when I'm on wifi.

PS: There's an image that can't be loaded on the confirmation page when registering for email updates.

> How are photos added to the library?

PhotoStructure imports files that are available to the device that it runs on: local files and anything mounted via a network filesystem (like AFS, NFS, or SMB/CIFS).

I use SyncThing or Resilio Sync to send my phone's photos and videos to my NAS. When I'm on vacation with limited bandwidth, I add a sync node on my laptop (which is connected to the hotel WiFi), so my phone syncs quickly to my laptop next to me, and then through the course of the day, the laptop syncs back home.

Although it's certainly more convenient to have everything wrapped into one app, I think there's an appeal to being able to choose the tool that works for you. (In other words: it's much less code I have to write and maintain--writing battery-efficient, stable background jobs on both iOS and Android are a PITA!)

> There's an image that can't be loaded on the confirmation page

Are you using ublock origin or a pihole? Those block most images coming from mailchimp.

I see, thanks! And yes, I agree on the app part. Which is where Google Photos' value lies for me as it is rock solid in that department.

I'm currently running both syncthing and Google Photos to store my photos. syncthing is great once it works, but it is definitely not something I would expect a family member to be able to set up.

In any case I'm very much looking forward to see where PhotoStructure is going. I've set up a reminder to give it a try.

FWIW, Resilio Sync has a desktop version that's easy to set up (a QR code pairs your devices, and you don't have to do anything to your router).

Is PhotoStructure a web app, or something else? I looked through the website and signed up for the beta, it seems interesting and is going on my list of possible Google Photos replacements.

It's a web app. I've packaged it up with Electron, but you can also run it via docker or even directly if you've got node installed.

I'll be sending out instructions to my next wave of beta users soon.

Only because you're thinking as "self-hosting" to be setting up a server, etc. Before cloud-connected security cameras, every cam system owner was "self-hosting", even if that mean the cameras just recording to a local box.