More than a billion people use the photos app every year. You take a photo with your phone and it will be uploaded to the cloud. If you pick the best photo and share it on social media, you'll forget about the rest of them. There is a constant stream of data about life.
It shouldn't be like that. Privacy risks are created by uploading thousands of photos and never taking any steps to sort or manage them. It's time to stop being an information hog before it gets out of control.
Over the course of six weeks, I have deleted thousands of photos that had been uploaded to my photo account. I erased over 16,000 pictures and videos. My photos collection contains a lot of sensitive personal information, I don't need to keep so many photos, and I wrestled my collection into shape to free up a lot of space.
My photo archive goes back to the early 2000s, when I used an eight-MP camera. It is not possible to say how many photos there are, but they are all handled by the internet giant. The photos were initially stored on CDs and moved to a different location before finding their way onto the internet. I started paying for more when my accounts were limited.
There are family holiday shots inside the collection. There are many pictures of food and dogs. I take more photos every year because my phone cameras have improved. I'm not alone. In 2020 the company said it holds 4 trillion photos with 28 billion new photos and videos uploaded each week.
Deleting a lot of photos was a lot of work. I used an iPad to scroll through the photos I had backed up and tapped the ones I wanted to send to the trash. In a 45 minute session, I erased 2,211 photos. Only two or three of the 16 pictures of me running through a forest are still valid. The news article about a goat being arrested didn't make it through the process unscathed, even though I was verified on social media.
There were a lot of images that should not have been there. For a long time, I kept photos of my passports, as well as those of my friends who had sent me the details for booking trips. I found pictures of the things I need to log in to my account. I kept people's addresses and pictures of directions to their houses. There are pictures of notebooks from sensitive meetings and private email addresses. My photos contained a huge amount of my life. I didn't know they were there and I forgot about them.
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