Earlier quoted context omitted.
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"…
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.
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.