Also, I pay for iCloud... but they're not paying me for using my phone and bandwidth. I never agreed to that.
They can't just pull the rug out from me after we already have an agreement. I mean they can, because I probably "agreed" to it and some fine print garbage EULA, but those fall apart in a court of law.
You can use another photo app, link it to another cloud provider, and be free of the burden.
If you use Photos, you're along for the ride, and you've consented to whatever it does.
You don't get a line-item veto on code you choose to run, that's never been how it works.
For what it's worth, I'm basically with the EFF on this: it looks like the thin end of a wedge, it sucks and I'm not happy about it.
But being histrionic doesn't help anything.
> it looks like the thin end of a wedge, it sucks and I'm not happy about it.
But you just said that you can disable it. So, you can be upset about a possible future but I'm the one being melodramatic? That's a good one! You chose to run the OS. So by your logic that gives you no right to complain either.
I do understand that I can disable iCloud for my photos and I will do that. We'll see how long that lasts until they decide to tie the next feature and the next one and the next one to something that I don't like. Because that's how this works. Every time they do something that they know people won't like, they simply make it so that you lose access to something else if you decide to stand up for your principles.
They should just use their own computers to do this stuff.