I just finished downloading pretty much every photo I have taken for the past, oh, 10 years or so into the new Google photo tool. Now, when my laptop eventually goes pffzzzzyt (which had better not happen any time soon), my pictures will be safely stored in the cloud. For free!

Pictures of my son and my wife and my dog. Our vacation pictures. Pictures of Christmases in Cincinnati. Of family reunions. Of golf outings. All safe and sound now in the hands of Google.

Urp.

Not long after I finished the process, my wife passed on a news piece about privacy and Google, and a quote from Apple’s Tim Cook which pretty much said (I’m paraphrasing here), “Cover your heart! Google is out to steal your heart!”

Well, to be honest, I’m not sure how this works, so I very well could be wrong. And I’m not about to spend three hours online looking up Google’s privacy rules.

But I’m assuming that Google can use my vacation pictures, and my not-quite-sharp shots of my son’s prom, and the increasing numbers of selfies that are in my photo oeuvre that make me look like I’ve been chasing parked cars and do with them whatever they please. Sell hammers. Recruit zombie programmers. I don’t know.

They can already, I’m guessing, see where I shop online, what sites I visit. They probably know my bank balance better than I do. They can read JD Blogs before I finish this post, I’d imagine.

And I should be, I guess, more outraged. I really should be.

But Google … these guys are clever.

One of the things that Google photos does is make a little more out of your photos. They took one of mine that I snapped on a trip to Denver a few years back and “stylized” it into the photo on the top of this post.

It’s not exactly what I was after. But I like it. I’m keeping it.

Thanks, Google. You guys are swell.