The Prelude

Recently, I watched DeviantOllam’s Turn Off This AI Crap. If you just want the tl;dw: it’s about the “smart features” which are part of Gmail, for which the content of all e-mail traffic is scanned, allegedly not always with proper information to the user. But that’s not the point I am going for today.

In any case, it was once more a push for me to reduce my dependence on Google. I had already begun to move my e-mail usage from Gmail to my own domain. What, however, still firmly lay with Google was my calendar and my contacts. And in contrast to e-mail, there’s no simple solution for those services offered by my hosting provider¹. But no despair, cyon’s blog² itself gave me the solution: Baïkal

Google?

The installation proved quick and easy, nothing in the way of my moving my data over any more. As I now went to tackle my contacts, I noticed the export from Google Contacts to apparently contain thumbnail images. The contacts saved on the server, however, were all less than 1 kB each, way too small to contain any image data. This had me for a second, until I had a closer look and saw the issue:

BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:3.0
N:Doe;Jane;;;
BDAY;VALUE=DATE:19700101
PHOTO:https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/contacts/AG6t...xB3
UID:c18937ac-e16c-4a1c-874d-148e18501f88
END:VCARD

The image is—sensibly enough—not integrated into the VCARD directly and also isn’t saved on Baïkal. The link to the Google service remains and each time, the contact is shown with its image, it will be accessed again by web request (unless already cached on the device).

This is of course less informative for Google than the whole contact being saved there, but still might prove valuable as a usage signal. Furthermore, Google still has the contact data from when the image was uploaded. It follows, that the transfer of contacts is only of limited effectiveness, if this connection remains intact.

Now what?

As a first step, I cut this connection. A quick and dirty Python script to remove the links from the VCF export took care of that. This allowed for a clean import of my contacts to Baïkal. In the same step, I also downloaded all the images from Google as I may need them again.

This, of course, means, that contacts which I synchronise in the future, will not contain a thumbnail image any more. This I will have to maintain manually from now on. There may also be solutions to automate this, but as of yet, such I have neither searched for nor found. One possibility might be to encode the image into the contact itself, as seems possible according to the vCard Wikipedia article. I might have a go at this in the future.

Is it worth it?

For me? Yes. Does it keep me safer, more private, more efficient? Maybe, it is a step to more control of my own data in any case. Whether Google actually uses the data of the thumbnail images being downloaded, I cannot say. However, if one considers the business of Google and their creativity in tapping new sources of data, it would certainly not surprise.

What does surprise me, however, at least a little, is, that none of the tutorials I consulted on migrating towards Baïkal mentioned this possible link.