Also this week: a photo backup that quit, an FTC refund check, and new limits on license plate cameras

I can't write a full piece on everything that happens in tech every week, and you don't have time to read one anyway. So on Fridays I point you at the handful of stories that actually matter to everyday people, tell you in a sentence or two why you should care, and send you to someone who reported it well. Four this week.

Google Drive stopped backing up your photos on Monday

If you ever set up Google Drive on your computer to push a folder of pictures into Google Photos, Monday was the day that arrangement ended. Google published August 10 as the cutoff. Nothing you already uploaded is gone, and the backup on your phone is untouched. New pictures in that folder just aren't going anywhere now. And if you had that folder going to Photos and not to Drive, there is no second copy sitting in Drive either.

The replacement lives at photos.google.com, and it wants a Chromium browser like Chrome or Edge. Click "Create and add photos" at the top right, then "Back up folders," pick your folders, and when it asks for permission take "Allow on every visit" rather than plain "Allow," or it asks again every time. Then read Google's own condition on it. "To allow backup, keep the Google Photos tab open on your browser or have the Photos Web App running." Close the tab and the folders stop going up. Drive used to do this whether you had the tab open or not, and now you have to leave something running.

Google did warn people first. It started putting notices inside the Drive app on June 15 and stopped letting anyone set up new photo folders the same day. One oddity though. Three days after the cutoff, Google's own help pages still describe it as something that will happen, and the company has published nothing confirming it went through. So go and look rather than take anyone's word for it, mine included. Open photos.google.com and check the backup status at the top of your library, where it will say backup complete, backup paused, or no backup at all. The backup you never look at is the one that has already stopped.

Source: Google Photos Help

The FTC is sending $23.8 million in refunds to Grubhub diners and drivers

The Federal Trade Commission announced this week that it is sending 640,038 payments to people who ordered from Grubhub or drove for it. The total is more than $23.8 million. It closes out a case the FTC and the Illinois Attorney General brought in December 2024, and the list of complaints was long. Grubhub told drivers they would make more than they made. It listed restaurants that never agreed to be on the platform. And it locked diners out of their own accounts and their own money, gift cards included.

There is no claim form and no site to sign up on. Most people get a paper check in the mail. The rest get a PayPal payment, and that one does have to be opened and accepted. The FTC asks that checks be cashed within 90 days and PayPal payments accepted within 30. Miss that and the money is not automatically gone, because the FTC says it may be able to reissue a payment if there is still money in the fund. Questions go to the refund administrator, Analytics Consulting LLC, at 1-888-446-4992.

Tell anyone in your house who might get one. The FTC's own line is that "the Commission never requires people to pay money or provide account information to get a payment." So anybody who calls asking for a fee to release your Grubhub refund is running a scam, and the refund is the bait. If one ever gets you, there is an order to work through in the first hour.

Source: Federal Trade Commission

Flock is changing its plate camera rules after a year of officers misusing them

Flock Safety makes the cameras that read every license plate that drives past them, in more than 5,000 communities across 49 states. On Thursday the company announced it is tightening how the police can use them. The length of time it keeps plate data by default drops from 30 days to seven. Every police search has to carry a case number by the end of the year. Software that flags odd search patterns becomes mandatory for every law enforcement customer, accounts get suspended automatically when someone's behavior looks wrong, and two-factor login is required as of now.

The reason is a year of reporting on officers using the system to follow people they knew personally. The Washington Post documented at least 50 cases on August 2, and in 26 of them the person being tracked was a wife, a girlfriend, an ex, or a woman the officer wanted to approach. Georgia by itself has arrested at least 20 officials. A former Riverside County deputy was convicted on ten counts in February and sentenced to six years for using it to stalk his ex-fiancée.

The case that put this in front of the public is from Texas. In May 2025 a sheriff's sergeant in Johnson County searched 83,345 cameras across the country for a woman who had ended her own pregnancy. He typed the reason into the log himself. "Had an abortion, search for female." Sheriff Adam King said afterward that it was a welfare check and that her family feared she would bleed to death. Records the Electronic Frontier Foundation later obtained tell it differently. The file was an open death investigation into a "non-viable fetus." Investigators asked the district attorney whether they could charge her and were told Texas law does not allow charging the woman. The person who reported her was not her family but a partner later charged with assaulting her. She was never charged with anything. Most of what Flock changed on Thursday comes down to making an officer write down a reason. The sergeant in Texas wrote one down.

We wrote in July about what one of these cameras actually does. What is new is that you can go looking. Haveibeenflocked.com will tell you whether an officer typed your plate in and what reason they gave. This only works for the agencies whose logs somebody has already pried loose, so a clean result there doesn't prove anything. Deflock.org maps the cameras people have found and spotted, which makes it uneven by definition. More than 1,500 agencies publish a transparency portal, though Flock keeps no directory of them, so you find your town's by searching for it. There is no opt-out for you personally. The only one that exists is your city council. That is where the contract gets signed, and it usually passes in a batch of routine business that gets approved in one vote, with nobody saying a word about it.

Sources: Flock Safety and Electronic Frontier Foundation

Half a million Camrys can lose the dashboard and the turn signals together

Toyota is recalling 508,354 Camrys in the United States from the 2025 and 2026 model years. Toyota's global number is about 655,000. The other 147,000 or so were sold in other countries. The paperwork calls them Camry Hybrids, which throws people off, but every Camry sold here since the 2025 redesign is a hybrid. If you have a 2025 or 2026 Camry this means you. On some of them the 7-inch instrument display comes up blank when you start the car. In the filing's words, "the turn signal lamps, the hazard lamp function, and certain warning buzzers (including the key left in ignition and the driver/passenger seat belt reminders) do not function."

It happens at startup, at random, and not while you are driving. The catch is that if it does happen you drive that whole trip with no turn signals until you shut the car off and start it again. Nothing has to be replaced. A dealer updates the software on the display, free. It is not an over-the-air update, so it does mean a trip in. Toyota starts mailing owner letters September 21 and expects to finish by October 5.

Don't wait for the letter. Put your license plate or your VIN into Toyota.com/recall, or call Toyota at 1-800-331-4331. If your dashboard has ever come up dark on startup, say so when you go in. It may well have been this. But a blank cluster on these cars also turns up in two other open Toyota recalls and in something as ordinary as a dying 12-volt battery. So have them run your VIN against all of it rather than assuming one update covers everything. It is easy to forget how much of a new car is software now.

Source: Toyota USA Newsroom

That's the week. If one of these four is somebody you know's problem, send it to them.

If you are new here, Start Here collects the pieces worth reading first, and the Tuesday email carries the whole week in one place.