You tape over your camera.
But your wedding photos live on Google’s servers.
People who consider a piece of black tape over their laptop camera a security measure — while uploading their most intimate moments to the cloud without a second thought. What does this say about our relationship with digital freedom?
The paradox that affects us all
Look around. In the next café, the next office: the laptop has a small piece of black tape over the camera. The person behind it is uploading their favorite memories to Google Photos — wedding photos, baby pictures, first days of school.
This isn’t a quirk. It’s a social attitude. And it reveals a fundamental contradiction in how we handle privacy.
We tape over the camera because we can imagine someone watching us. It’s a visible, tangible risk — a picture of us taken from a distance. It feels real. It scares us.
But the wedding photos? We hand those over without hesitation. To a corporation with servers in the US, terms of service that hardly anyone reads, and business models that run on our data. That doesn’t feel like a risk. It feels like a service.
A stranger looking through your camera: Visible. Unsettling. Something you can fight.
A corporation storing, analysing, and monetising your intimate moments: Invisible. Everyday. Accepted.
What really happens to your photos?
The world’s most popular photo cloud has been active for over a decade — with over a billion active users. Until 2021 it was free. Then it started charging.
Why the change? Because the business model was always based on the content — not the fee. And because the terms of service always allowed it.
A hosted Tycho Operations space costs less than a typical streaming subscription — and runs on European servers. Your wedding photos actually belong to you.
The terms of service of such providers allow them to use your content to improve its own services. That includes AI training. That includes advertising. That includes, under the US CLOUD Act, handing data over to US authorities — without notifying you.
„If the product is free, you are the product.“
— Silicon Valley principle, more relevant today than ever
That applies to photos. It applies to documents. It applies to every backup you’ve stored somewhere in the cloud without thinking about it.
Wedding photos. Birth certificates. Tax records.
Imagine handing a stranger on the street a key to your home — and asking them to store your most private documents, family photos and diaries. For free. No contract. With a note that they’re allowed to use the items to improve their own services.
You’d say no.
But when that same stranger has a colourful app on your phone and calls themselves a cloud service — we upload without hesitation.
„My photos are safely in the cloud. Always accessible. Free. Nobody looks at them.“
Your photos are automatically analysed: faces recognised, locations mapped, emotions evaluated — all flowing into algorithms and advertising data.
The camera paradox decoded
Why do we tape over the camera — but not the microphone? Why do we protect the webcam — but upload our most intimate family memories to foreign servers?
The answer lies in psychology, not logic.
Visibility: A camera can see us. That’s visually imaginable. We know it from films — the hacker looking through the webcam. It feels immediate.
Abstraction: An algorithm analysing your baby photos and storing them in a data centre on someone else’s servers — that’s abstract. We can’t picture it. So we don’t evaluate it as a risk.
Convenience: The major cloud services — they’re wonderfully convenient. Automatic backup, face search, perfect organisation. Zero friction. So we don’t think about it.
This isn’t a criticism. It’s human. But it’s worth questioning.
What if your photos really belonged to you?
There’s an alternative today that’s just as convenient — but without the compromises.
Immich is a self-hosted photo management tool that matches Google Photos in almost every way: automatic backup from your phone, facial recognition on your own server, maps, albums, sharing. Everything. But your photos live on your hardware — not on their servers.
Nextcloud does the same for your documents, calendars and contacts. Your private cloud storage — but under your control.
No CLOUD Act. No terms of service allowing analysis. No price increase after the next quarterly report. Simply: your data. Your rules.
A hosted Tycho Operations space costs less than a typical streaming subscription — and runs on European servers. Your wedding photos actually belong to you.
When did you last check your privacy settings?
Most people haven’t opened their Google account settings in years. The iCloud terms of service were clicked away without being read. The photos accumulate — tens of thousands, collected over years — on servers that don’t belong to us.
The tape on the camera is a reflex. A good one, that instinctively feels the right thing.
It’s time to apply that same instinct to our data.
Your photos. Your documents. Your space.
Tycho Operations brings Immich + Nextcloud to European servers — under your control. No US cloud. No monthly dependency. Simply yours.