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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
by 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 agoWhat 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 agoThis 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 agoI saw the untag feature, but it shouldn't be my job to monitor facebook 24x7 to untag embarrassing photos.
- jonknee 15y agoIt 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."
- divtxt 15y agoCan someone suggest why my above comment was downvoted? I gave an actual occurrence for a hypothetical. The only offense I can see is that it was anecdotal evidence. edit: thanks to those who upvoted me back to 1 :)
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- JohnLBevan 15y agoAgreed - in fact, in the UK the Data Protection Act makes this a legal requirement (not that Google have to abide by UK law). You could change it such that users can only see the individual pics they're tagged in, and not all pics in the parent album. That may be preferable, but makes the situation more complex and means you can't see the picture you were tagged in in context. As you say, communicating how the security works is likely a better approach than changing the security model.
- Flenser 15y agoWhat 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? Let's break this down and relate it to physical (they're both real) photos: What if you tagged an embarrassing photo of me Considering only viewing the page for the photo at this point: With physical photos it's possible to write someone's name on them, and online it's always possible to add a description identifying who is in a photo, so being able to tag anyone doesn't increase the information storage of the system. shared it with a circle of hundreds of co-workers (that you excluded me from) People can show physical photos of you to other people without you knowing. They can send or grant access to digital photos without you knowing. Being able to grant access to photos of you on a social network is just an extension of this. Granting access so that people can see the photos when viewing an album or see an album in an album list is (or could be) separate from where or how that permission to view the photo is made known. and then not only do I not know the picture is out there We don't know that about physical photos, or photos that are sent in emails. but co-workers can see it by visiting my profile and looking at pictures tagged of me? Now this would be problem. There shouldn't be anything viewable on your profile by other people that you can't see yourself. Photo's should only be able to be shared and sent in private by explicitly sending a message to a group of people. I don't think that scenario is possible with G+ at the moment. Tagging someone in a photo automatically gives that person access to the photo. What G+ currently lacks is a way to tag someone without giving that person access to the photo. That's not perfect but it's better than the alternative which you described. Hopefully they'll find a way of making it possible to tag someone in private without putting it in front of people in ways that it's not possible in the physical world. You can't pin embarrassing photos on people without them noticing.
- Flenser 15y agoWhy the downvote? I was trying to say that tagging isn't the problem, it's where the tagged photos are visible.