Comment by LinuxBender

And you can’t even escape these companies by moving to another country.

In my personal view the internet became one big country with overlapping laws and government policies and collusion by corporations. Ever so often I use google to see what search results they can muster but otherwise I don't use cloud storage and do not find myself depending on google. For email I try to teach my friends how to use Thunderbird so they can click a button and their email is mostly GPG encrypted.

If I wanted to share files with someone that will not fit in that GPG encrypted email then I plonk them down on a mini-PC or a VM and share them over HTTPS with cache-control headers to reduce risk of file caches or SFTP with authentication. This is just my own preference and I am a stodgy cranky old bastard but if someone decides that basic auth is too much friction then it was not important for them to receive the files. I implement my own data retention and destruction policies. How my doctor or lawyer decides to store the files is up to them. I can only hope they are wise enough to not store things on their fondle-slab. An intelligent doctor should be able to handle basic authentication and/or be able to follow simple instructions for creating and sharing a GPG public key with me.

Or I could just snail-mail them an encrypted USB drive, however a GPG encrypted email should suffice for sending a few little images to a doctor. Some will bring up rubber hoses and wrenches but there are mitigations for such things. Some might even want legislation to to bandage these dark patterns but experience has taught me to not trust that corporations would be held to account at the same level and standards as citizens.