I am very privacy-oriented, but my recent Pixel phone somehow obtained all my pictures from my Linux computer
So I am attempting to swap phones, but because I am trying to use a pixel 9 xl and it was not previously on my network, I have to wait 40 days to unlock it so I can install GrapheneOS.
I saw on Monday that suddenly there were a lot of photos dated from last Sunday on the phone's default "Photo" app. I have been keeping things to a minimum: I haven't logged into anything Google, and I've only installed F-Droid apps. Also, I had some issues with my desktop and did a clean reinstall 2 weeks ago.
But still disturbingly, my ENTIRE ~/Picture directory (and subdirectories) from my PC were loaded onto my phone.
Now, I'd like to clarify, I do have a few Google accounts, but I have them logged into my desktop with containers on Firefox (particularly, I use one for a current hobby type situation that I have to use, and the other is a 20+ account that I've moved away from, but I still want to monitor).
I want to find out why anything from my PC ended up on this somewhat secluded phone. I have not attached it via USB, and while I have been attempting to limit my connections, I do need to access some of my rl/PC stuff on the phone. But I haven't logged into a google account on it, yet, all my photos showed up on it. I have not plugged it into the computer since I tried putting GrapheneOS on it, which failed due to it not being unlocked (PLEASE CORRECT ME IF I'M WRONG HERE, BECAUSE I STILL HAVE TO WAIT 2 WEEKS!), yet all these pictures that I would have never expected ended up on this phone.
And I just was looking around my ~/ directory, and I saw a directory titled .nuget... I checked pacman (I'm on Arch, so that's my package manager), and it's not installed, but I deleted it because it had a lot of sketch files that ... okay, so I deleted the directory and honestly I don't have it anymore to state what exactly was in it. But I'm really tired and it triggered issues, and I looked and I see that nuget is not installed... so okay, I'm just gonna end this here because I do need to go to bed.
But, would anyone be able to provide any assistance/advice/suggestions on how the heck my phone magically obtained my Linux desktop Picture files?
To get them to your phone one of two things have to have happened:
You uploaded them and forgot
You had some sort of Google-related cloud sync that you put on your Arch system somehow. This is not a trivial accomplishment, and your browser likely didn't do it on its own, either. Computers are not magic, there's probably not some payload doing google cloud sync in a random AUR package you installed without paying attention, so it has to have been something you set in motion.
The only solution that makes sense is for you to find the timestamps on your phone and try to identify what you were doing at the time.
Al the timestamps were from last Sunday, when I was playing copious amounts of Payday 2 and drinking beer.
My SO was out at a ballgame with a friend, and I had a day to chill to myself... I was not messing with either my phone or desktop files. That's what confuses me so much.
Syncthing last connected 7/19. I never plug my phones into my PC unless I'm deliberately swapping files, and at that, I usually send files via email since I often can't find a cable nearby.
I know I didn't copy anything on purpose (yeah, I had a few beers, but it was spread out over time and I'd eaten plenty as well). Bash history goes back to the reinstall, but unfortunately does not have a time stamp. I see when I was copying everything over (July 18/19), but there are no cp commands after I started purging files I didn't need from what had been copied.
Thanks for reminding me to look through bash though! I had meant to do that but never gotten around to it for whatever reason.
Anytime I hear weird stories like this, I'm reminded of that one story on reddit where the OP kept finding random, creepy post-it notes around their place that were written in their own handwriting, but had no recollection of writing. Someone recommended OP get a CO detector. And lo and behold, the OP was being poisoned by CO and that's why they couldn't remember doing any of that.
Not saying that's what's happening here, but maybe it's worth looking outside of the obvious.
I am concerned that I may be traveling down a path towards dementia/alzheimers as many of my maternal relatives have gone, so this isn't completely out of the question. :(
I do have a CO detector built into the smoke alarm though, and it's sitting about 6 meters to my left in the hallway.
I don't know what's going on with the rest, but since I happen to know about this:
NuGet is a package manager used for downloading libraries while building .net (C# and the other programming languages in that family) applications. ~/.nuget would've been a cache of packages downloaded while you (or something running as your user, possibly
makepkg) were compiling something. It's both harmless and safe to delete, since if you do need any of it in the future to build something else it'll just get re-downloaded.Well, thanks for at least that clarification!
Would need an itemized list of software you use on both devices, but my blind guess would be restoring a backup from somewhere, like syncthing perhaps.
I did install Syncthing, but I only specified my phone's Download directory and my computer's specific directory at ~/Syncthing/Pixel9Plus. I do not have it running automatically on my desktop (I just checked, it's not running, and it's not scheduled to run in systemd; the only 'sync' listed is for keeping the keyring synced).
I don't believe that's the problem, unfortunately.
I mean, it has to be something you did in some capacity. While Google is trying to get their grubby fingers on as much data as possible, in this case I firmly believe it to be a red herring. They can't access data out of the blue and while they also practice dark patterns it also isn't relevant. Because none of their desktop sync tools work on Linux anyway, people have had to resort to third party tools for years.
So, even if it isn't Syncthing, it likely is something you did and didn't realize. Frankly, it is next to impossible to actually diagnose for us. But I'd double-check if you are just syncing what you think you are, as Syncthing is a far more likely suspect than any Google shenigans.
Yeah, I'm just at a loss as to what it could be. I had reinstalled on the 18th, pretty sure I copied all the pics from my old drive to the new (all desktop stuff) on the 19th, and when I opened my phone the morning of the 28th, the pics were all there dated the 27th. I know I did not use that phone except to message, and I was basically having a 'me' day and ignored it most of the rest of the day. I believe the timestamps on the pics were around 6pm, at which point I was gaming and finishing up laundry. I'd given up on the phone by then and would only put it on my dresser and charge it for the night by then.
Just a shot in the dark, are these pictures also on the old phone? My guess would be they somehow got added to the old phone, Google photos beamed them up to the cloud, and on the new phone photos beamed them down again (and probably waited until it was on, fully charged, and still connected to a charger to download them - which is maybe why they didn't show up immediately).
I don't use Google photos, but you can probably log in online and see if they exist in the account, and if they do, when they got uploaded/added.
Nope, that's what keyed me into the shenanigans.
Mostly what clued me was two old wallpapers I downloaded and used for like maybe a month when I first swapped to Linux back in '19, but never deleted.
Also I would be curious as to how google photos could obtain photos from an account that hasn't logged in - which is what really irks me (I'm waiting for the stupid phone to be unlocked by my provider, because I got it from a "friend" and they don't want to call in and wait to explain how it was on their account [and ngl I don't blame them]) so I gotta wait 40 days while it's on the network. That being said, I believe Monday is the 40th day.
Edit: also, I used to keep my old (and still current) gmail account associated with some pics and other stuff. None of that showed up on the new phone, despite my PC being logged into that mail account on a sandboxed firefox.
Modern Android is very foggy on the concept of folders and storage locations, and likes to group files by type of thing, like "Images" or "Audio".
So the images and folder hierarchy might not even be all synced over to the phone and stored in a "Pictures" folder there; they might be being made available to the system from some app as pictures that it knows exist and can produce when requested.
There are a variety of syncing apps that might plausibly be able to do this: maybe Syncthing has figured out how to do this somehow, maybe you have one of the Linux desktop environment/phone integration systems set up, like KDE Connect, and this is among its features. Maybe you are using Dropbox or Onedrive or something similar and it has helpfully gobbled up a bunch of photos from the PC.
Is it still syncing? I.e. If you add a new photo on your PC, does it appear as available on the phone? That would make it much easier to tace what is doing it, because you can use deep Linux magic to see what processes are looking at those files when it happens.
Can you find the relevant photos in any of the Google Photos sections of any of the Google accounts you mentioned? If not, then it isn't Google Photos.
Were these photos all shot with a phone? What evidence do you have that they came from your computer and not from the phone that captured them or the previous phone you had when copying over contacts and such?
So, the fun bit was google files showed them all under a "Pictures" folder, but looking at the foss program I replaced it with, they were actually under /storage/emulated/0/Pictures, though all my DCIM pictures also showed up in the same Pictures folder in google files.
I do have KDE Connect installed on the phone, but while I had tried utilizing it on my PC before I reinstalled, I never got it to work properly. It is not installed on the PC at the moment... but you had me thinking that was it the culprit until I verified that I had not reinstalled it.
/storage/emulated/0/Picturesis indeed the place "real" pictures actually on the device would probably get dropped.Are you sure copying over pictures is not a thing KDE Connect might be convinced to do even (or especially?) if it is not working quite right? Because if you had it on the phone and the PC and were trying to link them, that's a plausible avenue for data flow, and you probably had the same pictures folder on the PC before your PC reinstall.
Or maybe you backed up the pictures to the phone before your reinstalled and your house is full of carbon monoxide.
CO monitor is literally a few meters from me...
And no, KDE Connect has yet to work, as I also had my old phone and laptop connected, each trying to connect to the PC. The order of connection was: old phone, laptop, new phone (with all the pics).
Additionally, I checked and see I removed KDE Connect before the date the pictures migrated.
Where you say the phones default "Photos" app, are you referring to Google Photos? If so, are you looking at photos in your cloud, or on your phone's storage? If they exist on the phone's storage, what folder path are they in?
Yeah, I had been using google's photo app. I am not logged into any google account on the phone though (and thus I cannot use the google play store or install any apps from it).
I now have disabled google photo and google files and am using foss options from f-droid.
I've since deleted all the copied pics, but I believe they were in the /Pictures folder.
I just tested a photo taken by a friend, shared with me via G:Photos, I saved to my account and then downloaded to my phone. So this photo has never been on my phone til I had G:Photos pull it. It went to
/storage/emulated/0/DCIM/Restored/IMG_1914.jpg.So I'm not sure how anything ended up in your
/storage/emulated/0/Picturesdirectory. Looking at the contents of that directory on my device, it seems to be a destination for other apps, but each of those apps also has its own subdirectory in that parent directory (Pictures/Messages,Pictures/Screenshots,Pictures/Substack, etc). But from my test just now, I feel confident saying it wasn't Google (or Google Photos, at least). You're not signed into any Google account, so it wouldn't have been a restore of a previous backup?These were current files; I have a google account but as far as I know, it's never had access to the current files on my drive. I've also gone through various iterations to limit its abilities as well. I've actually refused to use google phone apps (including messenger and contacts) when I discovered all my emails and phone numbers between my old Samsung and my gmail account had been merged into the apps/email address book.
So while I've had my google account since ... ugh, maybe 2003 (back when you needed an invite), I've never utilized the photo aspect/shared drive it offered.
Did you have these photos on a previous phone which had device backup enabled, and did you restore from backup when setting up this phone?
Nope, they've only ever been on my desktop PC. What clued me in were like 3 pictures I downloaded back in 2019 as wallpaper that I used maybe a couple weeks but then replaced.
I've read most of the comments. Without more data, my first suspicion would be Syncthing. Even if you have it currently set to sync only certain things, and excluding your photos, it's possible that it was set up some other way in the past. It's been a while since I installed Syncthing, so I don't remember the defaults, but it seems possible that, when freshly installed, it has some default folders set up to auto sync. Another possibility is Nextcloud, if you use that, because it's possible to set a whole folder tree to autosync with Nextcloud. Also, I would still consider KDE Connect a possible culprit at this stage.
You could also try intentionally reproducing the file transfers, such as be reinstalling and setting Syncthing up again (and/or Nextcloud, and/or KDE connect). Copy a new image file into your Linux ~/Pictures folder, and test what happens.
Last possibility I can think of is that someone other than you did this sync manually, and both of you forgot about it.
I just find it extremely odd that 1) it would have gone outside of folders that were set up and 2) it only targeted pictures on my PC drive, and moved them all to the phone's photo (non-DCIM) storage.