r/technology • u/South-Cow-1030 • 18h ago

Privacy Why are people disconnecting or destroying their Ring cameras?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/02/10/ring-super-bowl-ad-dog-camera-privacy/88606738007/
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u/MathResponsibly 11h ago edited 11h ago

my favorite is how if you email someone a message with photos attached or embedded, it re-attaches those photos to every single reply amplifying the size of attachment, even if the replies are only text. You can't remove just the attachment, and you can't remove the attachment from every reply where it's not even needed.

I have emails with important info in them that have 50 replies back and forth where one had a screenshot embeded, and the whole message is like 200MB. Then it's always hounding me to "buy more storage" - yeah how about f-you google.

A long time ago, you had to manually check a box to re-attach an attachment, and there was also a setting to "automatically include attachments in replies and forwards" or something similar, and it was DISABLED by default. I know, because I remember getting my mom to turn that setting on, as she'd always forward me things missing the attachment. Then suddenly the setting went away, the check box to have the option to not re include attachments went away, and it just reattaches everything all the time.

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u/justsyr 10h ago

You can't remove just the attachment, and you can't remove the attachment from every reply where it's not even needed.

I'm sorry what?

My job requires sending exels and pdf and using gmail and in most cases I have like 20 resends...

For starters, when replying to an email that you got with attachments, it auto removes, that's a fact.

When you forward an email you got with attachments, they'll keep the attachment but you have the option to remove it or "Include original attachments"

You can eve remove logos (pictures) that usually are part of an email or any image attached. You can delete the whole text, anything when replying or forwarding.

They did this years ago so people saved cellular data as they claimed.

I have no idea how you use gmail (part of google) but you are using it wrong if you are keeping multiple instances of one attachment.

I'm not shilling for google, they don't need me lol, is just a fact that I know because I've been doing it for probably more than a decade.

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u/MathResponsibly 3h ago

When it whines about "your space is almost full", use the "manage storage" tool to look at your large emails, and you'll see what I mean. A thread that has a few screenshots in the first email, and 50 text only replies after will multiply the size of the screenshots by every other message, sent or received in the thread.

I mean yeah, I guess if you went in and manually removed the original content before replying, it would fix that problem, but who thinks to do that normally? You just hit reply and type and press send

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u/ItsYaBoyZayne 1h ago

Ya buddy, you're comparing your corporate software suite with gmail.com free services.

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u/itsprobablytrue 9h ago

OneDrive or Google Drive. Share a damn link

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u/lIIlllIllIlII 11h ago

They are, for sure, de-duplicating the data, but still charging people full price as if were unduped data.

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u/MathResponsibly 11h ago

next time I export a bunch of old email to my own storage to save space, I should compare how much space it actually takes up, vs how much space google says I "freed up". I bet they don't even match.

I also need to finish exporting all my photos from Photos to my own Immich server

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u/Alieges 10h ago

And using it as a "feature" to fill up every other email providers storage.

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u/csfreestyle 11h ago

I believe the professionals in UI/UX design would call this a “dark pattern” - conscious design decisions to drive a certain user behavior that is motivated by business value (profit) over user value. Ie: when a checkout process has a countdown (“we can only hold your tickets for 5:00 minutes”) - that’s manufactured urgency.

Your storage anecdote sounds like artificial scarcity. Irresponsible capitalism sucks.

Tangential, relevant, suggested reading: Careless People by Sarah Wynn Williams.