There’s nothing better than the perfect selfie. They’ve changed the way we interact with our surroundings, the way we share our daily occurrences with our loved ones and romantic partners, and how we memorialize nearly every event. We should be able to pick and choose who has access to our personal photos, especially our selfies, which is why Big Tech and hackers spend so much time and money on getting access to them.
Big Tech and your Selfies
There’s a saying in marketing, “If you’re not paying, then you’re the product.” Social media services like Instagram and free storage services like Google Drive spend millions of dollars every year on maintaining incredibly sophisticated servers to house your memories for decades. It is easy to believe that this is done in exchange for ad dollars and name recognition, but the truth is that they want to sink their teeth into your most private moments in order to monetize every aspect of your personal life.
When you pass your photos over to these services, you end up giving them an incredible amount of access to information you probably didn’t realize you were handing over. Terms of service for file sharing and storage services like Google Drive and Dropbox are distressingly vague. In many cases, these terms of service are simply an agreement that allows a piece of technology to operate. However, it is important to note that these are hardly ever written to give power to the consumer.
Dropbox, for example, is given nearly unlimited access to the contents of your storage. They may keep their hands out in the name of preserving their public-facing relationships, but once that no longer serves them, Dropbox customers have very little recourse to fend off the ever-growing loss of privacy online. We have seen how Google Photos has become a testing bed for its facial recognition AI. It may be the case that the terms of service promise not to share the facial information of your personal account, we should never forget that every minute spent using Google Photos is another minute spent as an unwitting test subject.
Ransomware and Your Selfies
In 2022 ransomware attacks fell a remarkable 66%. This wonderful statistic has become a reality by increasing the tech literacy of the general public. We have opened fewer bogus links and spurious downloads. We have also depended on more secure services to share our information. Hackers love to pluck information out of wifi connections in order to gain access to your machine.
With more secure photo-sharing methods, we have created a more secure ecosystem online. Link-based sharing and end-to-end encryption have become the norm in more places, and we have been able to protect everybody online regardless of their tech literacy levels by simplifying the security process.
AXEL Go and your selfies
No matter who you take your photos for, your photos should be in your control from start to finish. At AXEL Go, we understand how important it is to respect your privacy. To that end we have implemented natural and convenient sharing methods. With our secure, link-based shares, you can upload, secure, and share thousands of photos with minimal effort. Our decentralized storage servers mean that even if a hacker makes their way through our premium-grade encryption, the data they will have access to is incomplete and unactionable.
The ultimate security is just a click away.
Sources
Patel, Nilay. “Is Google Drive Worse for Privacy than iCloud, Skydrive, and Dropbox?” The Verge, April 25, 2012. https://www.theverge.com/2012/4/25/2973849/google-drive-terms-privacy-data-skydrive-dropbox-icloud.
Staff, Security. “Ransomware Attacks Decreased 61% in 2022.” Security Magazine RSS. Security Magazine, January 11, 2023. https://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/98772-ransomware-attacks-decreased-61-in-2022.
