Dalia Hatalova Blog Post #3/15

Google Photos is a popular form of cloud storage that draws users by offering to store and retrieve personal photos as desired. When Google launched the platform, it was originally free to use because Google needed more data on which to train its algorithms, making it a particularly interesting interaction between platform and user, which raises questions about digital consent. When users signed on, they gave up ownership of their images by clicking off 'accept' on a contract, which allowed Google to utilize them as data cannon fodder. As Victor Luckerson describes in an article, "Google already has plenty of pictures of objects that it's indexed across the web with its search engine, but it still doesn't know that much about what individual people look like." Having a vast database of images allowed Google to sell information about their users to advertisers, as some new articles raised concerns as early as 2015 when the platform launched. This desire for information on users is a similar motivation to Google's acquisition of Youtube, where "Google was predominantly interested in YouTube's (meta-)data revealing patterns of user's interests and behavior, in order to connect these patterns to other Google databases and sell relevant information and space to advertisers" (van Dijck 149). 

This very data allowed Google's algorithm to function effectively, which is a crucial aspect of data acquisition that is often less mentioned. This training of algorithms is expanded upon in Nick Srnicek's analysis, however, where he states that "Cloud platforms ultimately enable the outsourcing of much of a company's information technology (IT) department" (Srnicek 33). Hence, companies not only gather their own data but are able to gain additional data by renting their capacities to other companies: something Google Photos does on a personal level with users. The aspect of the Google Photos cloud storage being free served to draw as many users as possible. Similar to the search algorithm,  "the more numerous the users who search on Google, the better their search algorithms become, and the more useful Google becomes to users" (26). An early article discussed a concern regarding Google storage – in this case, Google Drive – owning material that is uploaded there dating back from 2012, but a lot of the discussion centers around privacy rather than the labor that this data provided by users contributes. 

While providing free storage and training algorithms may appear to be a fair exchange, the lack of transparency is nevertheless concerning. Tarleton Gillespie describes Google's strategy as appearing to be but a neutral procurer of services through self-labeling itself as a platform. He writes, "calling their service a 'platform' can be a way not to trumpet their [Google's and YouTube's] role, but to downplay it" (Gillespie 357). The last development in the saga of Google Photos that I identified from my searches about the service, which adds to the downplaying of the company's role in monetizing user data, occurred in 2020 when Google requested users to actively participate in training algorithms for better performance (Young Won, Vincent). Crowdsourcing algorithmic training in this way presents an interesting collaborative twist. While consensual, the publicity does make one question how users' relationship with Google has evolved through the years, resulting in an acceptance of how algorithms use our data. This acceptance is particularly surprising considering that Google did not explicitly foreground Google Photo's exchange of free storage in return for data at the launch of the service for fear of alienating its users.