Hi. New parent here. I'm making an honest attempt at preventing Google from building a profile about my baby.
One of the things I've changed is I no longer backup my photos to Google photos. Instead, I use an encrypted cloud storage solution. That being said, I use an android phone. A pixel phone for that matter. I'm worried that Google can still "see" the pictures I take even if I'm not backing them up to Google photos.
What is the consensus on this? Is not backing them up to Google photos making any difference or can Google scan everything on my phone anyway?
Google could add a feature to their OS to upload all pictures to their servers, but that'd likely violate laws and is easy to detect (unusual network traffic).
Thus it is extremely unlikely they upload your pictures to their servers if you disabled their cloud backup feature.
What's more likely is that they hash your pictures locally, and upload the hash to their servers, like some government proposals want to make them do (to find known CSAM, they say). Or they could track metadata of the pictures (location, date/time). This would be hard to detect and some of the info they likely already have through other features in the OS. Whether they do those things or not I don't know.
This data wouldn't reveal the content of the pictures, so nobody can see your images.