title: Prevent Google Glass from Auto-Uploading Photos
body: <p>Google Glass automatically uploads every photo I take with it to Google's servers, and puts them in a private Google+ folder. I don't take nude pictures, I'm not a Google competitor and I have no interest in politics, but this is still too creepy for me; I don't want my pictures sent to Google without my approval. After systematically searching all the relevant menus, trying Google's Glass Explorer contact form and their phone support with no luck, I'm looking for a programmatic solution.</p>
  
  <p>I have root access (using the unofficial method provided by Saurik, because the officially published method of unlocking the bootloader doesn't work.) Unfortunately, the relevant parts of Glass's software all seem to be closed-source; there was some noise in the press about it being open, but that turned out to just be the kernel, not the camera app, sync service or anything else. I considered setting up a cronjob to move pictures out of the default storage location soon after they're taken, but that breaks the Timeine. Looking through the list of process names with ps didn't suggest any obvious well-separated target to kill. I haven't configured network-sniffing to identify something to blackhole from /etc/hosts, but I don't consider this very promising because I'm not willing to break the builtin Google Search app.</p>
  
  <p>Rewriting and replacing the entire camera app with one that saves to somewhere Google doesn't know about, seems like it would work; but it's too much work for me. Any other ideas?</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT 29Apr2014:</strong> With Glass version XE16.2, the auto-backup handling has been rewritten, adding a menu option in Settings to force the image upload to run if you don't want it to wait for it to be triggered by being plugged in with wifi. However, there is still no way to turn the uploader off. Also note that the log-message format has changed; to test whether Glass is uploading images, set up devtools, plug it in, take a picture and run</p>
  
  <pre><code>adb logcat |grep "Upload image/jpeg"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT 6May2014:</strong> There is a <a href="https://www.glass-community.com/t5/Getting-Ready-for-Glass/how-do-i-only-backup-pictures-I-took-with-glass/m-p/120448#U120448">user report</a> that Glass also uploaded images from a private album on an iPhone that was paired with it. I haven't been able to reproduce this on my Android/Cyanogenmod device, and don't have an iPhone handy to test with; can someone test this for me?</p>