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Google Photos: Backing Up Pics Even After You Delete?

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Google Photos: Backing Up Pics Even After You Delete?

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Some Google Photos users are reporting that the app will continue to back up your photos even after it’s been uninstalled.

The issue came to light on Friday after David Arnott, assistant news editor at Bizjournals, discovered something funny going on. Arnott wrote that he downloaded Google Photos when it came out in late May, took a couple test photos to try it out, but ultimately decided to delete it and stick with Flickr.

Five weeks later, he re-downloaded the app to give it a second chance, but was surprised with what he saw.

“Instead of my pair of test photos, I saw hundreds of images,” he wrote(Opens in a new window). “They weren’t synced from my phone in that moment, because I always delete photos from my device once they’ve been uploaded. My phone must have been uploading pictures to Google Photos even though I didn’t even have Google Photos on my phone.”

Turns out, the issue doesn’t really have anything to do with the Photos app itself. As 9to5Google first noted(Opens in a new window), the auto-upload functionality has existed a lot longer than the Photos app has been around.

“The truth is, having the Photos app installed or uninstalled makes no difference to whether or not your snaps are being uploaded to Google’s drive in the sky,” the blog said. “Photos being backed up is a part of Google’s settings, and has been for some time.”

In a statement sent to PCMag, Google acknowledged that “some users have uninstalled the Photos app on Android without realizing backup as an Android service is still enabled.”

“This is something we are committed to resolving,” Google said. “We are working to make the messaging clearer as well as provide users who uninstall the Photos app an easy way to also disable backup.”

In the meantime, if you’ve deleted the Photos app and would like to turn off backup on your Android device, head over to Google Settings, select Google Photos backup and toggle the switch at the top to ‘off.'”

Meanwhile, this isn’t the first blunder for the less than two-month-old app. Google earlier this month was forced to apologize after the service automatically tagged two black people as gorillas.

For more, see PCMag’s reviews of the Google Photos Web app and iPhone app.

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Source link : https://www.pcmag.com/news/google-photos-backing-up-pics-even-after-you-delete