what happened to the guy was awful but in general, don't ever store medical correspondence on Google cloud or send it over email or messengers. Here in the EU and I would be surprised if it's different in the US there's dedicated apps for telemedicine which are regulated like medical devices, so there's confidentiality, no storage or scanning of vieo or audio, and so on. Sucks but you can't really treat any other services as secure or private.
I figure it's probably not typical but I disable every single piece of tracking possible and disallow any external cloud storage on every device I have. I just don't actually have a need to give Google thousands of my photographs and access to every piece of my personal history. The benefit would be marginal and the cost is unlikely but potentially catastrophic. (And seemingly more likely every year). Every new device I get I go through every setting and turn off all the new bullshit they've put in to steal my privacy, because they do constantly add to the attack surface.
There is. The Android camera app has a button on the top-right corner that lets you quickly switch between saving to "photo storage" or "locked folder". If you pick "locked folder", it saves it to a special folder that isn't backed up to the cloud and requires a screen lock to open.
that does sound like a useful feature for uses like this, but I've never heard of it (and many phones probably come with different camera apps provided by the manufacturer... I have no idea if the Camera app on my Motorola phone is the stock one or not...).
It sounds like a secure platform was likely used to send it to the doctor but the photos were taken on a phone and auto backed up to Google Photos and also texted to his wife’s iPhone.
