I don’t have that much money right now so I’m trying to cancel unnecessary subscriptions and I have an old Pixel XL with unlimited Google Photos storage that I could use.
afaik, Google doesn’t use your photos for AI training (unless you give them permission to do so) and aren’t used for any sort of ad targeting.
I kinda expect the type of answers that I’ll get but I had to ask anyways, just in case. Most threads I found talking about this (on Reddit mainly) were pretty old, so maybe the situation had changed over the years.
We don’t sell your personal information to anyone or use the content you store in Photos for ads purposes.
A quick search finds this page which claims they don’t use it for ads, but no statement on AI training.
Even if this is true (and not just “technically true”), there’s nothing that stops them from using your photos for those purposes in the future since it’s not zero-access encrypted.
It’s ultimately up to you if you want to take that risk.
They don’t offer E2EE so it’s all up to if you trust them not to misuse your photos. I think Google has a decent security track record so it’s not likely they’ll be exposed in a security breach.
I believe they require a warrant for law enforcement to access it so if you don’t expect to be investigated by law enforcement, it should be ok.