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Google Plus: Tagging automatically shares private photos

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Re: Google Plus: Tagging automatically shares private photos

#11

Post by mlinsey »

jamesaguilar wrote: post #2

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

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.

Re: Google Plus: Tagging automatically shares private photos

#12

Post by burke »

jamesaguilar wrote: post #2

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

My expectation would be that the specific photos I tag Person A in are automatically visible to Person A. I think this is reasonable, and other concerns come up if a person is unable to see which photos they are tagged in.

Making the entire album visible to Person A, I think, is not as reasonable.

Re: Google Plus: Tagging automatically shares private photos

#13

Post by divtxt »

mlinsey wrote: post #11
jamesaguilar wrote: post #2

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

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…

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. :(

Re: Google Plus: Tagging automatically shares private photos

#14

Post by 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.

Re: Google Plus: Tagging automatically shares private photos

#15

Post by 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.

Re: Google Plus: Tagging automatically shares private photos

#16

Post by ktsmith »

burke wrote: post #12
jamesaguilar wrote: post #2

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

My expectation would be that the specific photos I tag Person A in are automatically visible to Person A. I think this is reasonable, and other concerns come up if a person is unable to see which photos they are tagged in. Making the entire album visible to Person A, I think, is not as reasonable.

Why should Person A be able to see the photos they are tagged in if the photos have never been shared? If I have lots of albums on Picasa and I never share any of them but I tag everyone in them, that's pretty clearly for my benefit and not the benefit of the individuals in the photos. There's no harm to Person A by being tagged in my private album, nor is there really any benefit to Person A by having the photo automatically shared.

I think it's reasonable to share a photo where Person A is tagged only if the photo has been shared. Tagging and sharing are separate actions as far as most people are concerned so there's not a good reason I can see for the UI performing both actions on a tag event.

Re: Google Plus: Tagging automatically shares private photos

#17

Post by DVassallo »

georgemcbay wrote: post #14

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 infor…

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.

Re: Google Plus: Tagging automatically shares private photos

#18

Post by Turing_Machine »

divtxt wrote: post #13
mlinsey wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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. :(

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.

Re: Google Plus: Tagging automatically shares private photos

#19

Post by m3koval »

jabo wrote: post #15

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 se…

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.

Re: Google Plus: Tagging automatically shares private photos

#20

Post by georgemcbay »

DVassallo wrote: post #17
georgemcbay wrote: post #14

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 infor…

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.

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.

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