From ‘delete anxiety' to data breaches: The perils of all those photos on our phones

The Age

3 days ago

There's a golden moment in home-tech ­operations when all is proceeding as the nerdy guy on YouTube said it would. You begin to congratulate yourself on your own digital ­genius. And so it was recently when I had to migrate all my data from my old Android phone to a new iPhone. I was going it alone, my young relatives having resigned from the family help desk on the grounds of overwork, incredulity and Gen Z exasperation.
How hard could it be? I downloaded the necessary app and began. Soon the two phones lay side by side like unwilling transplant patients and the mysterious mating ritual got underway. Reassuring messages ­appeared. Before too long, it promised a mere 'two minutes remaining'. Then it stayed at that two-minute message. Hour after hour, as if they'd become star-crossed lovers who couldn't bear to part. Twelve hours later, same message.
For all its dispassionate digital cool, technology ­excels in veiled threats. Like Mrs Danvers but with a smiley face stuck on, it pretends to be a neutral servant at our beck and call, while all the while fuelling anxiety and gas­lighting us. All those impossible, ambiguous choices that begin in a robotically neutral tone and end with an air of doom. 'You have used 95 per cent of ­storage. DATA MAY NOT BE SAVED.' 'Are you SURE you want to Force Quit? You may lose changes.' Or this, recently: 'The page or resource you are ­looking for has expired – IT IS GONE AND WILL NOT BE COMING BACK.'
I can't help thinking wistfully of someone like Jane Austen having a little engraving of herself or her sister on a mantelpiece, and that was it for self-representation.
Now, still stuck at 'two minutes' after two days, the phone taunted me. 'Yes, you CAN cancel the transfer now,' it suggested silkily, '… BUT YOU MAY LOSE ALL DATA.' In the end, I had to cancel the transfer, even if it felt like pushing the big red nuclear button. It had lied, ­anyway. I hadn't lost all data. (Only the data I hadn't backed up when it had told me to.)
What I hadn't counted on was the possibility of ­ending up with too much. I found I now had duplicated Google and Apple versions of all my photos on the new phone. I chose one to kill off. A new message, like a hostage note but more neatly typed, popped up: '3453 photos will be permanently deleted. Proceed?'
Slaves to the image
Why did I feel such dread? Photos have always been precious to us, but I can't help feeling we've become enslaved to them, burdened by them, thanks to smartphones. Like overworked alchemists, always on duty, smartphones toil away to turn the present into a pixelated version we'll come to think of as the past. If we don't have the photos, even the rubbish ones, does our past still exist?
Almost everyone has more recorded images of their lives, and the lives of strangers, not to mention dogs, cats and feet, than ever before. Some five billion photos are taken daily, 4 per cent of which are selfies. I can't help thinking wistfully of someone like Jane Austen having a little engraving of herself or her sister on a mantelpiece, and that was it for self-representation. Even in the 1990s, people only kept a few albums.
Despite apps like Snapchat, rejoicing in ephemera, we're still stowing away staggering amounts. Back in 2015, the average user had about 630 photos stored on their smartphone, according to GigaOM, a tech ­analyst firm. Now that number is closer to 2000. According to a UK survey, Millennials have the most, averaging about 2500. A conservative estimate, I'd say. A quick poll among my Millennial relatives reveals one, with a toddler, who admits to 17,500 on hers, and a 34-year-old with 10,000 on his phone and 40,000 on his computer. They can't be all treasured memories, can they?
In the US, according to Photutorial, the average ­citizen takes about 20 photos a day. In Asia and Oceania, it's 15. In Africa, it's eight. In Europe, it's a modest five. T.J. Thomson, a senior lecturer in visual communication at RMIT University, says those ­numbers tend to reflect, among other things, whether a society champions individualism over collectivism or, to put it another way, feels their acai bowl is worth photographing with a view to sharing.
Smartphones are useful and fun, of course, but these cold-eyed Boswells relentlessly recording our lives also foster a kind of existential panic. People talk about ­suffering 'smartphone storage anxiety' – the fear of running out of storage space and losing photos. There are now terms like 'photo overwhelm', 'delete ­anxiety', 'photo management anxiety' and 'image overload'. Tech companies happily fan those worries, or possibly invent them, to sell storage plans and curation apps. AI is stepping up to help sort the mess and there are ­outfits like The Photo Managers, a professional association of personal photo organisers.
'How can I stop feeling depressed after losing six years' worth of photos from my phone?' asked one ­desperate man on a forum. 'The thought of losing all my memories of the last six years is crippling my day‑to-day activities and motivation.'
Everyone on the forum felt it was understandable the man couldn't get on with his real life while his digital life was missing in action. They agreed his memories lay in his phone. No one mentioned possible back-up storage in head, heart or imagination.
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'People are using photos to help ­experience things,' says Thomson. 'The camera is constantly tethered to our hands, so you're always looking through a screen to experience or document reality.' Hence the luminous sea of smartphones at any event, ­indifferently capturing wedding vows, Easter parades, the Grand Canyon, Taylor Swift, lunch, or a whale breaching.
Looking through a screen ­'flattens experience', as Thomson puts it, takes us out of the moment, in order to create evidence the moment happened. We'll check it out later, reduced to a ­manageable rectangle. It's as if the task of memory, of ­feeling even, has been outsourced to the phone. I try hard not to be one of those people because it's embarrassingly herd-like, not to mention annoying to the person behind you, but FOMO tends to defeat virtue. What if I don't have my own picture of the Mona Lisa?
Thomson's research found most ­images stay stored – almost 94 per cent – and only 6.5 per cent are shared, despite the vast uploads to ­social media every day. But whichever way you cut it, we have a ridiculous amount.
'It's similar to hoarding … People would rather pay an extra $2 for a little bit more [phone storage] space than do the work.'
Andrew J. Campbell, professor of cyberpsychology, University of Sydney
I put a radical idea to Andrew J. Campbell, professor of cyberpsychology at the University of Sydney: would it help if people suddenly got a message saying they had to reduce their photos to, say, 100?
'Sheesh, that would hurt a lot of people,' he says, quietly horrified. 'They'd have two responses. First, 'You're asking me to make time to curate at a level I've never decided to' and secondly, 'You're asking me to choose things I don't yet know if I want to get rid of.' So, part of it is a chore and part of it is, 'It means ­something to me even if I haven't looked at them.' It's similar to hoarding behaviour. Google has statistics on this. People would rather pay an extra $2 for a little bit more space than do the work.'
I agree that the weeding task is overwhelming. Enthusiasm wanes after about two minutes. So the ­images sit gathering digital dust, burning through storage energy, waiting to be selected as a 'precious moment', briefly recalled and forgotten again. There may be conscientious types who go through them regularly and reminisce. I suspect most of us rarely look at their photos because they're so ­chaotically stored and, dare I say, meaningless. Autumn leaves! A potato that looks like a dolphin! Six of us, backlit, ­somewhere, with regrettable haircuts.
Campbell agrees our first instinct has ­become to capture the moment, any moment. 'Our brains are wired now to record. This fear of 'did I take enough?' or 'I need to take a photo' is so strongly ­habituated that people automatically get their phone out when something has happened. I saw a car accident recently, a rear-ender, and immediately both drivers got out with their phones up. Not for a second did ­anyone think, 'I need to talk to that person, see if they're OK.' It was straight to video – 'I need evidence, I need to get this documented'.'
People, especially older generations, are increasingly using their phone in those functional ways, says Thomson. They'll take photos of dumped rubbish, a stabbing, a fire, damage to a rental car or a parcel, ­receipts, documents like a licence or passport. But the ID stuff concerns experts like Campbell. He's 'a bit thingy' about not putting data like that in the cloud. If he has to take a photo of ID for a visa, for example, he switches off the cloud, puts in a hard drive, takes the photo and then deletes it. (I would, too, if I knew how.)
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'I work in cyber-security as well,' he says, 'and we're very worried about the amount of visual data captured and held by host companies, and how it may be used for marketing purposes or to ­manipulate you. All that visual data is kept and analysed now by AI. How do we know it remains ours? Many tech companies have access to our photos, of course, because they're on their servers. They say they won't reproduce a photo outright, but it's not clear how these massive data sets are protected from data mining and breaches. There are anecdotal reports online of people's photos being leaked and used in advertising campaigns.
'We're also seeing a mash-up used as ­information to feed data models. For example, last year a Human Rights Watch report warned photos of Australian
children have been used without consent to train AI models that generate images.'
Yet here we are, snapping away and storing every day, blissfully unaware of what we've revealed. As Campbell says, 'People often forget they've dumped all that data on a server they don't own.'
So, what to do when that chilling message flashed up on my phone, along the lines of: '3453 photos will be permanently ­deleted. Proceed with your crazy death wish?' I pressed yes. I felt sick. Then, a day later, I felt lighter, released, as if Marie Kondo had dropped by.
Of course, they weren't permanently deleted. Like a salesman who hopes to clinch the deal on a second visit, the phone told me I still had 30 days before they would be gone forever. I got a message offering a ­storage plan.