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.

DON’T PANIC [yet!]

If you took my earlier advice and upgraded to Picasa 3.9 you may have noticed that it links to Google+ Photos not Picasa Web Albums. The actual photos are in the same place this is just a different view. However that view does have a few differences and omission. You can always (well at the moment) get back to the traditional Picasa Web view easily using this link.

https://picasaweb.google.com/home

 

Google do have a summary sheet noting the changes to Picasa Web Albums once you join Google+.

One special condition worth noting is that much of your web album may suddenly be FREE not counted in your 1024MB storage limit. Once you sign up for Google+ any photo less than 2048 pixels and any video less than 15 minutes does not count against your limit. I dropped from 24% used to 2.68% used!

Three of changes worth noting, that are not mentioned in the google list above, but which may be very important to many existing users are -

1. You can not share with your friends or family just using an email invite alone. You can still send an invitation email to view your photo BUT unless the recipient has a google account they will not be able to view the photo. This effectively means Picasa Web Albums is no longer suitable for private family albums unless the whole family join google+ or get a google account. I EXPECT THIS WILL BE A DEAL BREAKER FOR A LOT OF PEOPLE. If you have family members worried about privacy, don’t upgrade to Picasa 3.9 and perhaps stop posting family to picasa web.
2. The Picasa Web Album view still lets you set your creative commons licencing (albeit under allow reuse item). Whereas there is no mention of licencing in google+ photo. Does this mean google is abandoning creative commons? I EXPECT THIS WILL BE ANOTHER DEAL BREAKER FOR CREATIVE PEOPLE.
3. The picasa web view shows how many times a photo is viewed. The google+ photo view just show the number of +1s and comments.

Fencing Off Private Geo “Hot Spots” on Flickr

Flickr now allows you to create hotspots, which it calls geofences with specific privacy settings. These are useful for locations such as "home" or "school" or anywhere else you would like to make more private than your global default. You can have up to 10 geofences, that can automatically block the accidental public display of your location. Many smart phone users do not realize that the location of the photo is frequently also captured and embedded in the photos EXIF metadata data . Posting that photo on the net then will allow others, who know how to read the EXIF data to determine a lot more about your private life than you intended. The real problem is there are now a lot of common social tools that can look for and share this location detail with wind more importantly often without your knowledge, the geofences, accesses and content filter are a good reason to consider doing most of your social network sharing of photos via Flickr.

Alternative you could

• Use Picasa Web Album, and remove the location data from specific photos.
• Turn off the geotagging (it might be called location) on your phone (this may not always be in the phonaes cameras settings and might require reference to the phones manual)

Check out your geo privacy page in Your Account Settings on Flickr for more details. You can  also hide your camera’s EXIF data in Your Account Settings.

Some Dangers in GeoTagging (& How to remove them)

Whilst on my recent travels I was consciously trying to geotag every photo I took, which involved a bit of work for those taken on my DSLR (Pentax D20), but it was automatic for my new smartphone (HTC Wildfire). Almost everything I took with the phone had the location embedded in the EXIF metadata. Then I got thinking most cameraphone (eg IPhone) users would not even realize this and there are a lot of situations where they probably don’t want their location published, but this is exactly what happens if you then post one of these photos on the internet. There are two simples solutions too this

1) Turn automatic geotagging off in your camera phone (look under camera settings, it might refer to location rather than geotagging).

2) Use Picasa to manage (and remove) geotags

To remove a geotag in Picasa, Select the geotagged photos.

1. Click the Places button in the lower right corner of Picasa.
2. Click the red geotag icon on the map.
3. Click 'Erase location info.'

This both removes any longitude and latitude information from the photo's EXIF GPS metadata  and also removes your photo from the Picasa map. REMEMBER TO DO THIS BEFORE YOU UPLOAD YOUR PHOTO TO THE WEB!

If you look towards the end of the Wikipedia Geotagging Article you will find a more detailed discussion on the dangers of geotagging. Whilst I am still a big fan of geotagging photos, where appropriate, I feel it is important that everyone understands the privacy issues exposed by this technology.

Phew …scary, or self interest?

I was greeted today with this error message, as I tried to view this blog. Yikes this is not good. So how did something potentially nasty as, bin.clear whatever get onto my blog. Why is chrome warning me? I didn’t put it there! Or so I thought…
Turns out CleaSpring is a virally distributed platform to enable widgets to be able to set up on private web pages, blogs and social network site. And I had such a widget for displaying my geotagged photos down on the right hand side column, was the culprit. I gather the sinister bit that Bin.clearspring.com has a tricky flash embed that allows them to track and then aggregate what you are viewing (and then onsell this to advertisers) So it is dangerous a SuperBug?, as the message suggests or is it google not wanting others to be able do better than its own analytics and adsense? Who cares? I don’t like things that collect private info, especially when they don’t tell you and I don’t want my readers being scared away but nasty looking warnings, so no more "free" widgets for me (at least for a while).

The geotagging widget map is gone, If you like seeing where my geotagged photo are taken you can still check out my flickr map (without any warnings).