How to stop automatic photo harvesting?
- Thread starter asim18
- Start date
Man of Honour
Yes turn off the backup settings.
Soldato
Can you disable it? If not, turn off all permissions apart from storage instead?
Soldato
Whats the phone / App version? Samsung Gallery is a system app so you could roll it back to the first installed instance, maybe that doesn't have the behaviour? I updated the gallery on my S7 tester (through galaxy apps) just to check and I can't see this tagging when I'm not synced to the Samsung cloud. Default permissions appear to be SMS/Contacts/Storage (internet is a given now). You don't mean geo-tagging do you? Thats a function of the camera if so.
Thank you for your response.
App version is 5.3.06.32 on phone and 5.3.06.67 on tablet.
It is the first installed instance already came packaged with the Android 7 update.
I'm also not synced with samsung cloud, never accepted the dodgy "privacy policy" for Samsung apps, etc.
No I don't mean geo tagging, I'm talking about the thing where it scans all your photos and media including performing scene recognition, face recognition and Optical Character Recognition on documents to potentially steal passwords and confidential information, and then feeds all this private data to the AI supercomputers.
Don
How do you know it is doing this?
Because if I take a picture of a text describing a car or something it will automatically tag the image as "cars".
Soldato
Yeah WTF, do we have any proof (not gossip or opinion) this is happening?
I have an S8, and just checked data useage. I have Google photos back everything up over wifi and mobile data. Not Samsung Gallery.
My Data Useage:
Mobile data: Google Photos: 283Mb, Samsung Gallery: 1.94kB
Wifi data: Google Photos: 2.04Gb, Samsung Gallery: 2.49MB
So where is scanning taking place?
Mick
I have an S8, and just checked data useage. I have Google photos back everything up over wifi and mobile data. Not Samsung Gallery.
My Data Useage:
Mobile data: Google Photos: 283Mb, Samsung Gallery: 1.94kB
Wifi data: Google Photos: 2.04Gb, Samsung Gallery: 2.49MB
So where is scanning taking place?
Mick
Man of Honour
That doesn't mean the picture is leaving your phone though?
Soldato
So I have just opened up Gallery, and viewed a picture, press the top right 3 dots, and you get the option: Show date and location tags. Mine is turned off.
Is this the option you are looking for?
Mick
Is this the option you are looking for?
Mick
Helpful post but my options are different.
If I open an image in gallery, I get three icons at the top right, a Love Heart, a "i" info symbol, and three dots menu.
Under the three dots menu I have the following options:
Rotate left
Rotate right
Slideshow
Set as profile picture
Set as wallpaper
I dont see the option for "show date and location tags".
Soldato
Soldato
Soldato
Sorry for the size. My edit skills are lacking 
Don
is it option in the actual camera app? Maybe tied in to face-tagging?
I need to pop out for a little while I will have a trawl through some more menu options later tonight.
Thanks for the responses so far.
Yes Armageus it is partly to do with face tagging, my sister sent me some photos of my nephews at peppa pig land and then it's cropped out mugshots of them and it's asking me "who is this person" "who is this person" "who is this person". But obviously it's scanning everything and if there's a confidential document for example it will do OCR and read the document to suggest tags.
Thanks for the responses so far.
Yes Armageus it is partly to do with face tagging, my sister sent me some photos of my nephews at peppa pig land and then it's cropped out mugshots of them and it's asking me "who is this person" "who is this person" "who is this person". But obviously it's scanning everything and if there's a confidential document for example it will do OCR and read the document to suggest tags.