I just got schooled by the Adaptive Curmudgeon, who posted some cautionary words about using your smartphone for snapshots.
Last fall a Generous Reader sent me a couple of DSLRs, which are capable of feats in excess of most of my needs. I’ve been trying to get into the habit of using the smaller one, but frankly it’s easier to use the smartphone for everyday snapshots unless I need a better lens. And sometimes (often) when my AirDrop won’t connect I’ll move innocuous photos to the cloud drive so I can get them on the laptop for the blog.
I admit, boomer that I am, that before today I didn’t know that my phone was automatically sending EVERYTHING to the cloud whether I told it to or not. I just looked and found 1000 photos there. Deleted them, then deleted them again from “deleted photos.” Which might mean anything or nothing. If nothing, I hope NSA analysts aren’t easily bored.
I picture a whole bunch of people shaking their collective head and muttering “Duh. Thought you were a privacy freak.” Hey, I’m an old guy. If I had a VCR its clock would probably flash 12.
Incentive to use the SLR more, that’s for damned sure.
Yah. I was just forced to get a smart phone due to a network “upgrade” with an upgraded monthly fee. Imagine my shock to see my laptop’s email contact list suddenly appear on my new (non-flip, dammit!) phone. “Syncing” and “Sharing” and “Near Field Whatsit” and 24 of 25 apps were already turned off. Uh-huh. We may be living in the future with interesting times, but I don’t hafta like it.
Joel, you may want to look at the settings on your DSLR. Some of these cameras automatically geocache the location where any photo was taken.
https://digicamhelp.com/taking-photos/geotags-compromise-your-security-and-privacy/
There are ways to have a smart phone that doesn’t share everything, but the default on all of there is set to fuck privacy give us your data so we can sell it.
I used to use an iThing, I had all the sharing turned off, every software update I would have to go back in and check all the settings because sometimes it would helpfully turn them back on, because everyone wants their photos and data automatically backed up.
My current phone is a google phone with all the google bits removed, it’s still a snitch but it doesn’t send everything to googles servers every minute.
I’ve talked to Joel about the cameras and know what he has and no GPS chips or wifi in the cameras. They predate the widespread use of both in DSLRs but a perfectly usable cameras.
The image at this link sums up my feeling about tech
Though I do have a Google phone, I have as much turned off as I can. You can’t turn everything off on a regular Android phone. There are phones that have all of the Google bits removed…
Yeah, I know I’m late here, but I recall years ago, i came across this free program, where you could take pretty much any photo you could find on the web, copy and paste it into this program and it would give you the exact Land L coords where it was taken, then using an early version of google earth, you could locate it. I guess the L and L are encoded into the photo.