7 ms·

Google Plus: Tagging automatically shares private photos

190 points by DVassallo 15y ago

jamesaguilar 15y ago
This is the behavior I expect. I don't think I'm alone in this.
- ktsmith 15y ago
  It's not the behavior I expect, and I would not have tagged anyone in any of my photos had I realized that tagging was sharing.
- DVassallo 15y ago
  The problem is the automatic "merge" of Picasa Web with Google+. If I mark an album as private in Picasa Web, I wouldn't expect anything to be shared. Especially if I would have been doing this for years. This violates the principle of least astonishment, at the very least.
  - lukesandberg 15y ago
    I think it does make some intuitive sense (even if there is confusing messaging on this). If i tag someone in a picture, then clearly they should be able to see that picture (i mean they were there when it was taken so there should be no problem with that). Extending this to the album level makes some sense because presumably everything in an album is related to a particular event (so that person who was tagged would have been there for all of that). That being said there probably just needs to be better messaging on this so that users understand what exactly it means to tag someone.
    - yaix 15y ago
      Clearly not. 1) It would make sense if you see the world only as one big group (i.e. without any "circles"), like Facebook does. But having different levels an types of relationships is G+'s strong point. This totally contradicts this point. 2) In Picasa, the setting was "private" and it was private. Now, that suddenly changes and there is no way back. Many people have relied on the former policy and know have a big "surprise, you are screwed" flashing on their screen. Not good. And there are more reasons, but these two are already more than sufficient.
    - ktsmith 15y ago
      Allowing someone that was tagged in a photo to see the photo is fine with me. Letting them see the entire album doesn't make a bit of sense because there's not really a good way to automatically determine if the rest of the pictures in the album are relevant to that person. While you might make an album based on events I tend to make albums based on dates. During periods where I don't take a lot of pictures I might have all of the pictures in an album for a specific month. If I then tag a friend in a picture from a baseball game we went to he now has access to all of the pictures in that album which might include pictures from a private family outing or event. Could my organizational habits be changed? Sure, but I shouldn't have to. The much bigger problem I have with this is that the people tagged in your albums not only get the ability to see the entire album, but to re-share the album. I am extremely meticulous in whom I share anything with. I disable re-sharing on 99% of my posts that are to family and friends. I disable re-sharing on ALL of my shared photos. By using the tagging feature my desire to limit sharing is completely ignored. So while I might want to tag someone in a picture for my own benefit, especially if it was at an event where maybe I didn't know everyone very well, I won't use it if the albums are shared without my consent. edit: I just noticed that referencing someone with the +name or +email address notation in photo comments has the same effect of sharing the photo + album + re-share http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=1299273 http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=129927...
      - hammock 15y ago
        Allowing someone that was tagged in a photo to see the photo is fine with me. Letting them see the entire album doesn't make a bit of sense How many people realize that Facebook has been doing this for a long long time?
        ktsmith 15y ago
        Probably not that many. I don't use facebook in large part due to their "everything is public" attitude so it doesn't surprise me. Google+ started off with the circles model and a control whom who share with model so this does surprise me.
    - Turing_Machine 15y ago
      I agree that people should be able to see photos tagged with their name, though it's not a certainty that they were there. People often tag (e.g.) pictures of their kids with the names of the grandparents, so the grandparents will be sure to see them. On the dark side, there are also users who tag people maliciously (tagging a picture of Hitler with their boss's name, say). I don't agree with letting them see the whole album by default. Albums aren't necessarily associated with an event. If you have an album called "Family", you might want to let your buddy see the pictures of the family barbecue he attended, without necessarily sharing the picture of your wife breastfeeding.
    - kenjackson 15y ago
      Extending this to the album level makes some sense because presumably everything in an album is related to a particular event (so that person who was tagged would have been there for all of that). I have many albums broken out by date. The fact that you were playing basketball with me at 10am doesn't mean you were at my sister's house that evening. Google is making social take a lot more energy than I care to give it. Circles seemed OK. But now having to break up my albums and tagging into visibility units is absurd. It's easier to just quit. G+ is making me really appreciate Facebook -- which I NEVER thought I'd say.
- RexRollman 15y ago
  Wow, do I disagree. Tagging and visibility are two entirely separate things.
  - protomyth 15y ago
    You hit the big UI problem and where Google failed. The fact that I tagged a picture has nothing to do with visibility. I added a personal note to the picture to give me more information. A simple discrete event. The fact somebody decided to add a part to the use case that now shares the photo is really bad design. Folks really need to stop themselves from making user actions have much longer reach than what the user actually did. It would probably be fine to have a "share button" appear next to the tag of the person's name. That shows that the picture is still private, but you might now want to share it with that specific person.
    - hammock 15y ago
      One could argue that if you take a photo of someone, they ought to know that you took it of them. In fact that's an argument in support of auto-tagging. You can always untasg.
      - protomyth 15y ago
        I guess that's an argument, but I really cannot figure out a good reason for it. If I write on the back of a photo that I took the people on the photo, I have no obligation to send them a copy of the photo. It also creates some serious distraction for anyone with a public career. Does a singer need to be notified about every fan who takes her picture? Let's go a bit further down this hyper-connected, automatic world. Let's say Google Plus implements facial recognition. Seems like a good idea, saves you some time. So, I upload a ton of photos and they get automatically tagged. It would be very hard to consider anything private under those circumstances. Worse, I am truly using "the cloud". Maybe some of those photos need to be deleted or edited. At the end of it all, I wrote a note on a picture. Having additional things happen without permission is just a bad UI choice and leads to problems and apologies. And since someone decided the whole album is now shared, it could lead to some physical danger.
- mlinsey 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    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 15y ago
      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 15y ago
- burke 15y ago
  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.
  - ktsmith 15y ago
    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.
    - jahmed 15y ago
      Because its me. If you have a picture of me and want to link it to my profile information then I think it would be reasonable for me to know you have that picture. There is obvious benefit for me to have that picture shared with me and aware that it exists instead of it being hidden away in your private collection. Tagging is sharing. I see tagging as creating a link between the photo and my google+ profile. Maybe there should be a second option of labeling my name but not linking to my profile and thus keeping the label private, which is odd but seems more like what you want.
      - chc 15y ago
        Do you also think it would be reasonable if Google copied me on your Gmail conversations everytime you mentioned my first name or anything I've created? I don't see how they owe you anything for privately linking to your profile.
      - ktsmith 15y ago
yaix 15y ago
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 15y ago
  you're not being "forced" to. simply don't tag that person.
  - patio11 15y ago
    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.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    - darklajid 15y ago
      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 15y ago
        "... 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.
      - 15y ago
georgemcbay 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    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.
jabo 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    That's good idea. But it still wouldn't solve the issue of people downloading the photos and making them public.
    - m3koval 15y ago
      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 15y ago
        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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sdizdar 15y ago
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.
- deleted 15y ago
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- rflrob 15y ago
  I think I would only care if they tag me AND share the photos with others. If they intended not to share it with anybody, then I don't care whether they think I'm in the photo or not. A more reasonable approach would be something like "if a photo is shared, it must be shared with the people tagged in the photo". As far as getting access to the entire album, not everyone uses albums for the same reason. I can't, offhand, think of a situation where the rest of the album would make a difference, but it's not unreasonable to expect that one might want to share only parts of an album with some people.
  - jasonkostempski 15y ago
    This. Private tagging and public tagging should be separate. I'd love to be able to tag the pictures with my kid in it, who is 2 and has no email address or, of course, Google+ account, and a few other people/animals who also don't have these things either because they don't care to or because they're animals, because I want to orginize them. I can do this on my local computer with desktop Picasa but then I have to start worrying about loosing my local data again, the whole reason I paid for the extra storage on Picasa in the damn first place.
  - ktsmith 15y ago
    I store most of my albums by date and not necessarily by context. So if you were to go through an album I would have to explain the context of each three or four pictures. I'm very particular about whom I share photos with so having a conference photo tagged and shared doesn't bother me. Having a family photo shared because I tagged the conference photo and they were in the same date based album is a deal breaker.
pwzeus 15y ago
facebook is the sameway...no one is questioning that
- DVassallo 15y ago
  Picasa Web Albums was never that way. It becomes that way automagically when the same Google account is used to subscribe to Google+. That's what I'm questioning.
- rjd 15y ago
  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.
ryanspahn 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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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ReneeKline 15y ago
I paid $32.68 for a XBOX 360 and my mom got a 17 inch Toshiba laptop for $94.83 being delivered to our house tomorrow by FedEX. I will never again pay expensive retail prices at stores. I even sold a 46 inch HDTV to my boss for $650 and it only cost me $52.78 to get. Here is the website we using to get all this stuff, GrabCent.com
RtodaAV 15y ago
omg people its in beta calm down
pg 15y ago
The url stopped working. If anyone can find a new one that works, reply therewith.
- hammock 15y ago
  Works for me. Also cached here 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 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:GyuhHac... Alternate discussion here http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/07/how-google-transformed-picasa-web.html http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/07/how-google-transfor...
  - pg 15y ago
    Sure enough, it works now. Must have been a temporary glitch. Ok, never mind.
BarkMore 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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.
daimyoyo 15y ago
"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?

190 points by DVassallo 15y ago

jamesaguilar 15y ago

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

ktsmith 15y ago
It's not the behavior I expect, and I would not have tagged anyone in any of my photos had I realized that tagging was sharing.
DVassallo 15y ago
The problem is the automatic "merge" of Picasa Web with Google+. If I mark an album as private in Picasa Web, I wouldn't expect anything to be shared. Especially if I would have been doing this for years. This violates the principle of least astonishment, at the very least.
- lukesandberg 15y ago
  I think it does make some intuitive sense (even if there is confusing messaging on this). If i tag someone in a picture, then clearly they should be able to see that picture (i mean they were there when it was taken so there should be no problem with that). Extending this to the album level makes some sense because presumably everything in an album is related to a particular event (so that person who was tagged would have been there for all of that). That being said there probably just needs to be better messaging on this so that users understand what exactly it means to tag someone.
  - yaix 15y ago
    Clearly not. 1) It would make sense if you see the world only as one big group (i.e. without any "circles"), like Facebook does. But having different levels an types of relationships is G+'s strong point. This totally contradicts this point. 2) In Picasa, the setting was "private" and it was private. Now, that suddenly changes and there is no way back. Many people have relied on the former policy and know have a big "surprise, you are screwed" flashing on their screen. Not good. And there are more reasons, but these two are already more than sufficient.
  - ktsmith 15y ago
    Allowing someone that was tagged in a photo to see the photo is fine with me. Letting them see the entire album doesn't make a bit of sense because there's not really a good way to automatically determine if the rest of the pictures in the album are relevant to that person. While you might make an album based on events I tend to make albums based on dates. During periods where I don't take a lot of pictures I might have all of the pictures in an album for a specific month. If I then tag a friend in a picture from a baseball game we went to he now has access to all of the pictures in that album which might include pictures from a private family outing or event. Could my organizational habits be changed? Sure, but I shouldn't have to. The much bigger problem I have with this is that the people tagged in your albums not only get the ability to see the entire album, but to re-share the album. I am extremely meticulous in whom I share anything with. I disable re-sharing on 99% of my posts that are to family and friends. I disable re-sharing on ALL of my shared photos. By using the tagging feature my desire to limit sharing is completely ignored. So while I might want to tag someone in a picture for my own benefit, especially if it was at an event where maybe I didn't know everyone very well, I won't use it if the albums are shared without my consent. edit: I just noticed that referencing someone with the +name or +email address notation in photo comments has the same effect of sharing the photo + album + re-share http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=1299273 http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=129927...
    - hammock 15y ago
      Allowing someone that was tagged in a photo to see the photo is fine with me. Letting them see the entire album doesn't make a bit of sense How many people realize that Facebook has been doing this for a long long time?
      - ktsmith 15y ago
        Probably not that many. I don't use facebook in large part due to their "everything is public" attitude so it doesn't surprise me. Google+ started off with the circles model and a control whom who share with model so this does surprise me.
  - Turing_Machine 15y ago
    I agree that people should be able to see photos tagged with their name, though it's not a certainty that they were there. People often tag (e.g.) pictures of their kids with the names of the grandparents, so the grandparents will be sure to see them. On the dark side, there are also users who tag people maliciously (tagging a picture of Hitler with their boss's name, say). I don't agree with letting them see the whole album by default. Albums aren't necessarily associated with an event. If you have an album called "Family", you might want to let your buddy see the pictures of the family barbecue he attended, without necessarily sharing the picture of your wife breastfeeding.
  - kenjackson 15y ago
    Extending this to the album level makes some sense because presumably everything in an album is related to a particular event (so that person who was tagged would have been there for all of that). I have many albums broken out by date. The fact that you were playing basketball with me at 10am doesn't mean you were at my sister's house that evening. Google is making social take a lot more energy than I care to give it. Circles seemed OK. But now having to break up my albums and tagging into visibility units is absurd. It's easier to just quit. G+ is making me really appreciate Facebook -- which I NEVER thought I'd say.
RexRollman 15y ago
Wow, do I disagree. Tagging and visibility are two entirely separate things.
- protomyth 15y ago
  You hit the big UI problem and where Google failed. The fact that I tagged a picture has nothing to do with visibility. I added a personal note to the picture to give me more information. A simple discrete event. The fact somebody decided to add a part to the use case that now shares the photo is really bad design. Folks really need to stop themselves from making user actions have much longer reach than what the user actually did. It would probably be fine to have a "share button" appear next to the tag of the person's name. That shows that the picture is still private, but you might now want to share it with that specific person.
  - hammock 15y ago
    One could argue that if you take a photo of someone, they ought to know that you took it of them. In fact that's an argument in support of auto-tagging. You can always untasg.
    - protomyth 15y ago
      I guess that's an argument, but I really cannot figure out a good reason for it. If I write on the back of a photo that I took the people on the photo, I have no obligation to send them a copy of the photo. It also creates some serious distraction for anyone with a public career. Does a singer need to be notified about every fan who takes her picture? Let's go a bit further down this hyper-connected, automatic world. Let's say Google Plus implements facial recognition. Seems like a good idea, saves you some time. So, I upload a ton of photos and they get automatically tagged. It would be very hard to consider anything private under those circumstances. Worse, I am truly using "the cloud". Maybe some of those photos need to be deleted or edited. At the end of it all, I wrote a note on a picture. Having additional things happen without permission is just a bad UI choice and leads to problems and apologies. And since someone decided the whole album is now shared, it could lead to some physical danger.
mlinsey 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    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 15y ago
burke 15y ago
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.
- ktsmith 15y ago
  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.
  - jahmed 15y ago
    Because its me. If you have a picture of me and want to link it to my profile information then I think it would be reasonable for me to know you have that picture. There is obvious benefit for me to have that picture shared with me and aware that it exists instead of it being hidden away in your private collection. Tagging is sharing. I see tagging as creating a link between the photo and my google+ profile. Maybe there should be a second option of labeling my name but not linking to my profile and thus keeping the label private, which is odd but seems more like what you want.
    - chc 15y ago
      Do you also think it would be reasonable if Google copied me on your Gmail conversations everytime you mentioned my first name or anything I've created? I don't see how they owe you anything for privately linking to your profile.
    - ktsmith 15y ago

yaix 15y ago

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 15y ago
you're not being "forced" to. simply don't tag that person.
- patio11 15y ago
  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.
  - deleted 15y ago
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  - darklajid 15y ago
    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 15y ago
      "... 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.
    - 15y ago

georgemcbay 15y ago

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 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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.

jabo 15y ago

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 15y ago
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 15y ago
  That's good idea. But it still wouldn't solve the issue of people downloading the photos and making them public.
  - m3koval 15y ago
    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 15y ago
      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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sdizdar 15y ago

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.

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rflrob 15y ago
I think I would only care if they tag me AND share the photos with others. If they intended not to share it with anybody, then I don't care whether they think I'm in the photo or not. A more reasonable approach would be something like "if a photo is shared, it must be shared with the people tagged in the photo". As far as getting access to the entire album, not everyone uses albums for the same reason. I can't, offhand, think of a situation where the rest of the album would make a difference, but it's not unreasonable to expect that one might want to share only parts of an album with some people.
- jasonkostempski 15y ago
  This. Private tagging and public tagging should be separate. I'd love to be able to tag the pictures with my kid in it, who is 2 and has no email address or, of course, Google+ account, and a few other people/animals who also don't have these things either because they don't care to or because they're animals, because I want to orginize them. I can do this on my local computer with desktop Picasa but then I have to start worrying about loosing my local data again, the whole reason I paid for the extra storage on Picasa in the damn first place.
- ktsmith 15y ago
  I store most of my albums by date and not necessarily by context. So if you were to go through an album I would have to explain the context of each three or four pictures. I'm very particular about whom I share photos with so having a conference photo tagged and shared doesn't bother me. Having a family photo shared because I tagged the conference photo and they were in the same date based album is a deal breaker.

pwzeus 15y ago

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

DVassallo 15y ago
Picasa Web Albums was never that way. It becomes that way automagically when the same Google account is used to subscribe to Google+. That's what I'm questioning.
rjd 15y ago
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.

ryanspahn 15y ago

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 15y ago
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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ReneeKline 15y ago

I paid $32.68 for a XBOX 360 and my mom got a 17 inch Toshiba laptop for $94.83 being delivered to our house tomorrow by FedEX. I will never again pay expensive retail prices at stores. I even sold a 46 inch HDTV to my boss for $650 and it only cost me $52.78 to get. Here is the website we using to get all this stuff, GrabCent.com

RtodaAV 15y ago

omg people its in beta calm down

pg 15y ago

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

hammock 15y ago
Works for me. Also cached here 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 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:GyuhHac... Alternate discussion here http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/07/how-google-transformed-picasa-web.html http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/07/how-google-transfor...
- pg 15y ago
  Sure enough, it works now. Must have been a temporary glitch. Ok, never mind.

BarkMore 15y ago

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 15y ago
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.

daimyoyo 15y ago

"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?