Tuesday, September 2, 2014

Photo Security Tips

Christopher Breen:

If you’d disabled photo sharing from your iPhone to your iCloud account those pictures would have remained on your phone. Although the horse has left the barn, here’s what you might have done.

Sriram Krishnan:

First, you deserve an apology from all of us who work in tech. This should be easier and more bullet-proof but it isn’t. We keep working on making it better.

Second, the title of this post is a lie. Nothing is ever completely safe unless you prefer to only use computers in an underground bunker disconnected from any wires. And even that may be insecure. The below are reasonable practices which will hopefully keep you safe while not making your normal usage of technology and gadgets impossible. Sadly, the only way to make sure something never falls into the wrong hands is probably to never have it in a digital form. This is especially true for those of you who get more attention from the bad guys than the rest of us - they’re always going to be trying to find the weakest link in.

I don’t actually want my photos to be in the cloud, with the last 1,000 taking up space on each of my iOS devices. But the alternative is to use a much less efficient workflow. I’d prefer it the photos were automatically transferred directly to my Mac, either over Wi-Fi or USB, without having to open Aperture, pick a project, initiate the import, delete the photos after importing, and then quit Aperture.

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Autosyncing of photos the way everything else is synced should be standard. Perhaps this is partially why Photos (coming in January?) is coming out - to improve syncing to be a system level issue. However I wonder what happens with Windows users.

@Clark I’m not holding my breath. If anything, Apple seems to be moving in the other direction. Photos is apparently built on CloudKit. They tried to get rid of non-iCloud syncing of calendars and contacts (but brought it back presumably after lots of complaints). There was system-level support, Sync Services, but it’s now deprecated.

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