
Google Plus: Tagging automatically shares private photos - DVassallo
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Picasa/thread?tid=52e06725a97fe570&hl=en
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sdizdar
This seems 100% reasonable to me. If somebody tags me I want to see that photo
- and the entire album (since context is also important). I don't want that
somebody starts taging me on some photos and then sharing these photos with
others without me having chance to untag myself.

~~~
jurjenh
Before people start forgetting real-world context here:

In the physical world, people can and do take photos with you in it. They then
get these developed, and may put them in an album with the people identified.

You would have absolutely no access to this photo unless they choose to share
this with you, however that may be. They can also choose to share it with
their friends, possibly even form a presentation with it to a certain slice of
the public, and you still have no control over this, or even access to it.

This automatic re-sharing is quite the opposite, and I suspect Google did not
fully follow the logical consequences through, or purposely chose to subvert
the current physical-world situation. I don't like it, I'd rather have new-to-
digital features following known physical traditions until there is ample
evidence that it may be a good thing to change it.

~~~
dpcan
The equivalent to your analogy is the "My Pictures" folder we all have on our
private computers. Google is not this. They are a giant corporation letting
you store your photos with them for free and they have documented that tagging
is sharing.

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kyro
Google's whole goal for G+ is that it's supposed to be modeled after how life
_really_ works – circles, hangouts, etc. The picture sharing is not how things
go down in the real world. When your aunt has goofy pictures of you at family
gatherings, chances are she's showed them to a handful of other individuals
without your consent. The pictures are _hers_ and she shares them with _her_
circles, regardless of who's present in those photos. The way Google is
handling this seems to go against the ethos of G+.

~~~
chrischen
That just seems like a disadvantage of real life that Google+ can improve
upon!

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BarkMore
There's more than the privacy issue. If the tagged person does not have a
Google+ account, then Google+ sends an email with subject "<Name of person
tagging photo> invited you to join Google+" for every photo tagged. Spammy.

~~~
kahawe
On the other hand at least you get notified that your name and face are now
publicly viewable on the intarwebs somewhere. The question is what you can
then do about it.

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yaix
I read it when I opened my G+ account, and it sounded to me pretty much like
Buzz all over again. Hope that gets fixed soon.

Only because some guy you barely know made his way into one of your holiday
photos, it doesn't mean you want to share your complete vacations with him.
Probably not even that one picture, why should you be forced to?

~~~
andrewcooke
you're not being "forced" to. simply don't tag that person.

~~~
patio11
I think it is more of a managing expectations issue. Consider another
situation: you pay me $25 via check. I can now debit your bank account for
$100,000. Surprised? "Don't write checks." doesn't quite cover it, does it?

P.S. Don't write checks.

~~~
darklajid
That is sure going off-topic, but - seeing that I never used checks in 30
years of my life, they are very 'popular' and common over here in Israel now.

Can you share your bad experiences? For me that stuff was never relevant and
something I heard 'old people' talk about. I feel like someone invites me to a
party and wants to play the gramophone for us..

~~~
praptak
_"... due to an unfixable security flaw in the way funds are now transferred
electronically, worldwide, it is no longer safe to write personal checks"_ \-
Donald Knuth, on reasons for no longer writing his famous reward checks.
Google for more info.

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jabo
There's one more privacy feature/annoyance with photos on Google Plus.
Apparently when I share an album with someone, that person in turn can share
that album with other people and can also see who else I've shared it with.
Now what's the point of a private album if everyone else can share my album. I
like how Facebook solves this problem. You, as the album owner get to choose
who sees the album. People who you've set the visibility as true cannot see
who else I've shared it with.

~~~
m3koval
Only allowing the owner to share an album is a false sense of security. If
someone can see your album, they could just as easily download the photos and
make them public.

Instead of disallowing it outright, I'd rather they make it clear that you're
sharing content with a wider audience. One solution would be to require that
the owner approves the share, similar to how tagging is handled.

~~~
jabo
That's good idea. But it still wouldn't solve the issue of people downloading
the photos and making them public.

~~~
m3koval
That problem is inherent with posting something online. The best any service
can do is make it difficult for someone to accidentally violate their friends'
privacy.

This, in my opinion, is where Google+ is failing: sharing makes it very easy
to make private posts visible to an audience larger than the author intended.

~~~
michaelschade
_This, in my opinion, is where Google+ is failing: sharing makes it very easy
to make private posts visible to an audience larger than the author intended._

In addition to G+ reminding users when resharing a limited post that it was
intended for a smaller audience and to be mindful of that, the original poster
can also disable resharing entirely.

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jamesaguilar
This is the behavior I expect. I don't think I'm alone in this.

~~~
mlinsey
I'm with you. This is how it works on Facebook and I suspect this is how the
majority of people expect it to work. Not only that, this is not only the
behavior I expect but the behavior I want. I suppose it might be OK with me if
someone tagged me in a photo that was private just to the person who took it.

But it would be a huge, huge problem if someone could tag me in a photo and
share it to some circles that didn't include me. Fake-tagging people or
tagging people in embarrassing photos is a major problem on FB, and the
privacy issue here goes two ways: the person you tagged also has their own
privacy concerns. What if you tagged an embarrassing photo of me, shared it
with a circle of hundreds of co-workers (that you excluded me from), and then
not only do I not know the picture is out there, but co-workers can see it by
visiting my profile and looking at pictures tagged of me? That would be orders
of magnitude worse than the status quo.

I'm trying to think of how you design a system that respects both my concerns
and those of the OP, and I can't come up with anything that would be
intuitive. (Suppose that you could tag an album full of people and keep it
private to yourself, but sharing it with a family circle caused it to also be
shared with everyone you tagged? That really would break user expectations). I
think the current implementation might be the best one, perhaps with more of a
warning in the UI that tagging shares with the person tagged. In essence this
is not a privacy complaint, it's a feature request: people want to use tags
for a different purpose (organizing private albums) than they are designed
for.

~~~
divtxt
_What if you tagged an embarrassing photo of me..._

This happened to me _3 HOURS_ after joining facebook, and was not even ill-
intentioned. (ah, young people!)

edit: I marked tagged photos as private for a year till that photo was
untagged. The photo is still there. :(

~~~
Turing_Machine
This may not have always been the case, but you can untag yourself and once
you do that no one else is allowed to retag you.

~~~
divtxt
I saw the untag feature, but it shouldn't be my job to monitor facebook 24x7
to untag embarrassing photos.

~~~
jonknee
It hasn't always been the case, but Facebook has a setting called "Who can see
photos and videos I'm tagged in". There's also "Let friends of people tagged
in my photos and posts see them."

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daimyoyo
"This move goes against Google's supposed philosophy of controlled sharing
within circles."

This is exactly in keeping with google's philosophy. When the pictures are
public, google can use them for advertising. Google+ was created to mine date
to sell ads against. Why do you think Larry tied the bonuses this year to
performance in social?

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georgemcbay
On the one hand, I can understand the point of view of the people who are
upset about this and there should at least be a way to disable this behavior.

On the other hand I view putting photos online (or even just having them on a
computer that connects to the Internet) as basically a binary sharing of that
photo with the entire world already. The Internet is like a reverse black hole
that sucks in all available information and then doesn't allow it to ever be
truly destroyed. That view has become so deeply ingrained that I can't bring
myself to personally care about this one way or the other... I just wouldn't
put pictures on Google+ (or any other site) in the first place if I wasn't
okay with the idea of the entire world eventually seeing it.

~~~
DVassallo
I disagree. One not-insignificant use-case of Picasa Web Albums was to share
photos with selected people only. Face-tagging was just another piece of
metadata that could be attached to private or public photos, just like the
location geo-tags, captions, timestamps, etc. It never had anything to do with
sharing.

~~~
georgemcbay
I'm not disagreeing with the fact that Google violated the principle of least
astonishment here in a way that people are right to be upset about due to
privacy concerns... that's what I was agreeing with on my "first hand".

I just don't have any strong emotional reaction to the situation because of my
binary view of sharing on the Internet. Any site feature that allows you to
share something "to selected people only" is more an illusion of
security/privacy than a real thing (you can't control who THEY share it with,
etc). Even if you never share the photo with others and have it marked
strictly 'private', I still see putting it up online as basically "sharing it
with the world" because all of the untrustworthy middlemen you introduce that
have access to that data regardless of your public/private settings.

Because I don't view such public/private/partially-shared/etc features as
effective security for photos/videos/writings/etc in the first place, when the
way they operate changes in some unexpected way I can't work up much rage
about it, though (again) I do see why other people may be upset about it.

~~~
DVassallo
I don't share that "binary view of sharing on the internet".

I store photos "on the internet". I also store emails in Gmail. I face-tag
photos with whoever is in them, for the same reasons I tag emails with whoever
they relate to.

This is as if Gmail were to automatically share my Gmail conversations
whenever I mention someone in an email.

~~~
nknight
I've got a better one: You write a cheque to somebody, and suddenly your bank
lets them see your transaction history.

There's a level of control and security one may sacrifice by doing things
online, that doesn't mean the information is automatically public, and it
definitely doesn't make it OK for Google to treat it in an entirely unexpected
way that actually violates ordinary privacy/access control rules.

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pg
The url stopped working. If anyone can find a new one that works, reply
therewith.

~~~
hammock
Works for me. Also cached here
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:GyuhHac...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:GyuhHacTTbAJ:www.google.com/support/forum/p/Picasa/thread%3Ftid%3D52e06725a97fe570%26hl%3Den+http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Picasa/thread%3Ftid%3D52e06725a97fe570%26hl%3Den&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&source=www.google.com)

Alternate discussion here [http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/07/how-
google-transfor...](http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/07/how-google-
transformed-picasa-web.html)

~~~
pg
Sure enough, it works now. Must have been a temporary glitch. Ok, never mind.

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ryanspahn
What's even worse that it automatically connected to Picasso which I must have
used 5 or more years ago for some very private photos. When I signed up to
google plus I was shocked to see these photos my ex gave me. There were under
albums. I was horrified. I think connecting ur Picassa account to google plus
was a bad decision. I never used it minus that one time years ago.

Fortunately I deleted them upon finding them a day later. Luckily I only had a
few friends in my circle at the time.

Overall I'm not using it. I still use Facebook until everyone moves onto g
plus.

~~~
carpo
When I signed up I remember they asked if I wanted to link to picassa, and all
my photos where private until I actually shared them with a circle.

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pwzeus
facebook is the sameway...no one is questioning that

~~~
rjd
Well judging by governments getting involved around the world I would say
there has been sufficient questioning of the handling of privacy.

I think a lot of people where really hoping (myself included) that Google+ was
going to give us the tool we wanted for social communication. But tis just
another Facebook, with all the privacy concerns, and restrictions of freedom
included. Everything that makes Facebook 'evil' is now part of Google.

Oddly enough a lot of musician and writer friends use pseudonyms, myself
included ... or even plain nick names for that matter.

Facebook doesn't seem to ban those people as long as they have 'real
activity'. So I could argue that Google is in fact on a worse 'evil' footing
than Facebook right now.

After I read through the Google "what is Google+ really for" powerpoint I
closed my account. It became obvious to me it was a lock-in attempt, and then
went as far as saying the main 'target' of Google+ was Microsoft and Apple
(because desktop apps where seeing a resurgence eroding Google business
ambitious).

In my personal opinion Google+ is a very sinister piece of work which should
be avoided at all costs. Because I know exactly how I would abuse it, and it
appears already that Google is thinking along similar lines to me.

