Google Photos :: Not So Private

I thought I would give google photos another chance (probably it's third) it seemed pretty harmless. While I can see it is attempting to make sense of the mess. It just keeps making the mess bigger. At least the photo it autoloads it makes private, right, until you share them, right. Actually wrong all it does is use a 40 character code to make the photo link difficult to guess, this includes all the old photo from Picasa Web Album that you thought where safely private and only shared via a password.

Effectively there is a massive jungle of photos out there and your photos are sitting there in the wild. It is easy to test out (access a photo in google photos) there will be a long url name to access it (the name is a web link not a jpeg address by the way. Paste that into a file you write to a usb. Take the usb to a foreign computer you have not use and cut and then paste the url in a browser you have not used so It will not know your google ID. There is your photo! Other have noticed this issue.

This is a really big deal, A significant betrayal of my trust.

Whilst I intend to keep using google photos for my shared photos and images (mainly for my blog). I have already turned google photos off on my phone and I'm working through deleting a lot of photo from my google photos account.