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Tech News and Commentary
Dave and the team discuss Apple becoming a $3 trillion company, Apple cutting Vision Pro production, flying electric cars, and more.
Nancy in Gilmer, Texas asked: What is up with this cloud stuff? I’ve never knowingly put anything out there in the cloud. I transfer my pics off my phone onto my hard drive which is then regularly backed up on an external drive. I don’t even know where to access this cloud. All of a sudden, I got a notification that my cloud account is full and did I want to purchase more space. No I do not. How can that be? I’m not even using it knowingly. SO I opened up the file and it’s full of random pictures. They are all my pictures but they’re all out of order and randomly placed. How did they get there? How do I get them off? I already have them saved elsewhere, so I don’t need them out there floating around on a cloud. More importantly, how do I prevent this cloud from accessing my personal pictures?
Nancy, it sounds like some app you use is set to backup pictures automatically.
We cant tell you what that app is, there are several that will do what youre describing… down to the would you like to purchase more space message.
Having said that, your photos got there because some app with access to them is set to back them up online, that implies that theres an account that theyre being backed up to. You should be able to figure out which app is running backups by seeing what site that email is sending you to.
How to get them off depends on the app, in some cases all you need to do is flip a switch in your phones settings and they will be deleted. In other cases that will only stop the upload and you will need to log into their platform and delete them manually from there.
To prevent access, check your phones settings. There should be a privacy area that will allow you to check which apps have access to your photos and to take that access away.
It could also be happening at the operating system level. For example, Apple allows you to set backups and control whether or not that includes photos in your iCloud settings (also found on the phones settings).
If you let that be enabled without noticing, theres a good chance that youve also given access to other apps to access your contacts, locations, or other things as well, so you may want to spend some time in your privacy settings to make sure you havent just tapped agree on anything asking you for permission to use your data just to get the dialog to leave the screen.
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