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Google photos does some super evil stuff if I were an attorney or the FTC I’d be all over them for dark pattern crap

I found this out because a friend shared some photos with my wife via Google, and she was prompted to install the Google Photos app.

The Google Photos app asks for permission to your iCloud Photos so that it can add photos, however it also starts uploading all of your iCloud Photos to Google photos.

Guess what happens then? You’re right, you have more than 15GB of photos, you’ll “run out of storage” when Google Photos fills your free Google storage with the photos it determined that it should backup for you.

Now your gmail account stops working.

But wait, there is a helpful prompt at the top of Gmail for you to buy more storage, or to clean up your storage. If you go to clean up your storage, you see that all these photos are the problem. Simple fix.

But, because Google Photos has linked itself to your iCloud Photos, if you delete the photos from the backup that Google decided it should make for you, the photos will be deleted from your iCloud Photos across all your Apple devices (they tell you this)

Now of course after you do this and purge the trash Google doesn’t immediately recognize that you have in fact freed up that storage and keeps trying to upsell you more storage