There are more barriers to digital sovereignty every day.

My wife hit the 15GB Google limit last week. Holy shit.

Her phone storage was full, so:

• Photos were silently removed from the device and uploaded to Google Photos.
• Once it was full, it locked her out of Google services. It even locked her email and took forms offline.
• It then demanded payment to get access to her files.

Google Photos is ransomware by definition.

I ended up doing a takeout, and found that all the photos had the exif tags stripped and I had to re-merge them from a .json file that sat next to it. Otherwise they had no timestamp/location data and no other software would index it.

Fixing the mess required me to alter my photo import program (written in C) and use some scripts I found on github. It was a full weekend project.

I can see why a lot of people will just pay the ransom.