Page 1 of 1

privacy and data

Posted: Sun Nov 29, 2020 9:35 pm
by rob
Hi, I've come across your app and it looks pretty neat. It's not clear to me what image data is stored from Google Photos or if it's simply just a passthrough of the API. It would be great to know what my photos can be used for if anything beyond just displaying and if data is stored on your servers. Thanks!

Re: privacy and data

Posted: Sun Nov 29, 2020 9:39 pm
by tim
Hi Rob,
Good questions. I believe our privacy policy answers them but to be honest it is some years since I wrote it, so i'll just give you the tl;dr here!
  • Soloslides uses the official Google Photos API: your password is never entered into our app or our webserver (it's google's server via standard oauth2)
  • We don't cache your photos/videos, or their IDs: Google's T&Cs explicitly forbids this. This makes app start up a little slower but thems the rules
  • The app collects no information from you, transmits no information about you, except for crashes which could (randomly) contain blocks of memory that get included in crash reports (see Crashlytics reporting per Google privacy statement). But heck this app doesn't crash so shouldn't be an issue there :)
So you should be good to go. If you have other questions just ask no worries

Re: privacy and data

Posted: Mon Nov 30, 2020 12:40 am
by rob
Hi Tim, thanks for your fast reply! Good to know that you take privacy seriously; I really appreciate that. Just to confirm, when displaying photos and whatnot, there is no image data that is stored in any database anywhere, and is simply just loaded to the frontend. Thanks! Glad to support a solo dev!

Re: privacy and data

Posted: Mon Nov 30, 2020 8:49 am
by tim
Yes, correct - photos are loaded from google's server onto your iOS device. Not transmitted to anywhere else. Same for the metadata. There is anonymous info collected, like how many photos were displayed in a long time period (ie. weeks) so I can see how the app gets used across multiple users, but I can't see any user-identifiable information. Thanks for your support.