From those first baby steps to birthday candle blow-outs, your family memories are priceless. Cloud storage ensures the photos that document these moments are never more than a swipe away — making it the go-to solution for parents looking to keep their albums safe, organized, and easily accessible.
But, after surveying more than 2,000 parents with children under 16 in the UK, we have found that beneath this convenience lies a growing concern about the security and privacy of these cherished snapshots and a real need for clarity and transparency around family photo storage.
What cloud providers really do with your photos
With growing media attention on the dangers of sharing personal images online — from the pitfalls of sharenting(new window) to the impact of digital footprints on anything from schoolyard bullying to job applications — it’s no surprise that 72% of parents agree that keeping their photos private is extremely important.
Yet, despite these concerns, almost half of parents (48%) are unaware that cloud services like Google Photos, Dropbox, Amazon Photos, or Apple’s iCloud, can access their uploaded photos and associated data.
For example, both Google Photos(new window) and Amazon Photos(new window) automatically scan images to recognize faces, identify events, and categorize content — from family vacations to birthday parties. This data is used to compile curated albums, but it can also be used to build detailed user profiles, personalize experiences, be sold to third parties and target advertising.
As prevalent as this practice is, less than half of surveyed parents (43%) knew that cloud storage providers could collect meta data — like date, location, or device used — from uploaded photos, and only 36% knew that the providers collect information like people and objects from the images themselves.
This is possible because most cloud storage providers only encrypt data in transit (as it travels to the cloud) and at rest (when it’s stored on their servers). Encryption works by translating data into an unreadable format that can only be deciphered by those with authorization. Providers, like Google or Dropbox, that use in transit and at rest encryption hold the keys to decrypt your files and collect your data while it is stored on their servers — benefiting its bottom line while leaving your data vulnerable not only to internal use, but to other forms or third-party access or potential breaches. Which is where things get more serious.
The risk of data breaches for family photos
It’s easy to assume that large organizations are inherently secure, but size alone is no guarantee of safety. Take Dropbox, for example — a well-known company with a history of security issues, including compromised passwords and unauthorized data sharing with third parties. Incidents like these highlight the vulnerabilities even major cloud storage providers face, and they can serve as gateways to serious crimes such as identity theft, online fraud, and deepfake(new window) misuse.
According to Professor Carsten Maple from the University of Warwick’s Cyber Security Centre, with today’s AI tools, as few as 20 photos are enough to create a realistic profile of someone, or even a 30- second video, expanding the scope of potential dangers — a fact that 53% of surveyed parents did not know.
Professor Maple continues, even when uploading seemingly innocent photographs, “parents are unwittingly opening their children up to possible exploitation by criminals who want to use their data for their own purposes.” Data gathered from photos can reveal sensitive information such as where your child’s name, age, where they live, and where they go to school. And, with over half of parents (56%) allowing their photos to upload automatically in the background, this creates a continuous and detailed stream of personal data — without ever needing to press ‘upload’.
Transparency matters now more than ever
There’s no doubt that there is a growing awareness of the digital footprint that sharing photos leaves behind — more than two thirds of parents (69%) recognize that there are risks, but a staggering 97% feel there needs to be more clarity from cloud providers about how their data is used in order to make more informed decisions about it.
At Proton, we believe transparency is not a luxury — it’s a necessity. With Proton Drive, our end-to-end encrypted cloud storage, the only people to ever see the photos or videos you store are you and the people you choose — not even Proton can gain access.
With the launch of Albums in Proton Drive, parents now have a simple and secure way to preserve family memories without fear of online dangers. Albums lets parents create and share albums of photos while encrypting both their content and their metadata, such as album names and locations.
Sign up for Drive Plus today and get 200 GB to protect your memories (that’s enough space to store more than 40,000 high-resolution 5 MB photos!) plus peace of mind knowing your family’s photos are in safe hands.
Perspectus Global (new window)conducted this survey, on behalf of Proton, with 2,019 UK adults who have children under the age of 16
