5 ms·

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

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