Privacy Tool Spotlight: Ente Photos
As part of my series "What's In My Privacy Toolbox?", I’m diving into the individual tools that help us protect our online privacy. While my list may be familiar to privacy enthusiasts, not everyone understands how each tool contributes to the bigger picture. Today, I’m focusing on @enteio Photos, a private and secure alternative to mainstream photo storage.
The Digital Photography Revolution
Digital photography has revolutionized the way we capture and share memories. With high-quality cameras readily available on our smartphones, we can effortlessly snap and share special moments. These photos are often automatically saved to the cloud, ensuring they remain safe even if something happens to our devices.
However, this convenience comes with a significant privacy risk. Photos contain a wealth of personal information, from the time, location, and device used to capture them, to details that AI can extract. This includes facial recognition, sentiment analysis, and even inferences about income level or political leanings.
Ente has developed a tool (They See Your Photos) that illustrates just how much information can be gleaned from a single photo, as demonstrated by the example below; a scary (and impressive) amount of information was gleaned from a single photo.
Moreover, companies like Meta and Google are legally obligated to provide photos to authorities if presented with a valid subpoena, warrant, or other legal order, as long as it complies with Stored Communications Act (SCA) standards. This applies to both public and private photos. Even deleted photos might still be recoverable due to data retention policies. Given these significant privacy risks, a secure alternative like Ente Photos is essential for protecting our memories.
Why Ente Photos?
To safeguard my cherished memories with privacy, I’ve turned to Ente Photos. This cloud-based service employs end-to-end, zero-knowledge encryption, ensuring that only I and those I choose to share my photos and albums with can access them. This means even Ente cannot view the photos.
To ensure the efficacy of the encryption, Ente Photos has been externally audited by firms like Cure53, Symbolic Software, and Fallible. In addition, Ente stores data redundantly across multiple providers to enhance reliability.
Ente Photos serves as a privacy-focused alternative to services like Google or Apple Photos. It offers automatic background backups from your device, allows you to organize photos into albums, and uses local AI to tag individuals. It can even generate automatic albums of your favorite people. Once it learns a face, it can identify it across all your photos, helping you catch any you might have missed.
The Ente Photos client is available for Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and Linux.
Learn More
If you would like to learn more about how Ente Photos can protect your cherished memories with privacy, check out Ente Photos at https://ente.io.
Remember, we may not have anything to hide but everything to protect.
