Jason Koebler, Motherboard:
When Google Photos was announced in 2015, I downloaded it. I had no intention of giving every photo I’ve ever taken to Google—which categorizes them, runs them through image recognition and facial recognition algorithms, makes weird algorithmic slideshows out of them, and adds them to its massive photo database—but I wanted to try it out in any case. I quickly realized it was not for me, but I did not delete the app.
And:
I texted him asking to see a picture. He responded with a video that he uploaded to Google Photos. Because I had Google Photos installed on my phone, it tried to open in the app. You cannot use Google Photos on iOS—even to view photos that have been shared with you—without granting the app access to all the photos on your phone. Because I was drunk, and because I wanted to see the puppy, I changed my app permissions. I watched the video (very cute, embedded below), the band started, I put the phone in my pocket.
You know what happened next. All his photos went up to Google’s servers, and went through the AI analysis that all photos go through.
Two sides to this. First, obviously, Jason made a mistake giving Google Photos permission to access his photos. Google Photos asked, as it should.
That said, this is the text of the alert Google Photos put up:
Google Photos needs access to your photo library to show photos in the app
Reading Jason’s piece, I don’t get any sense that Google Photos notified him that they were going to start uploading his photos to the Google servers, to start AI-analyzing them.
Should Apple require a finer grain notification when something like this happens? Or, at the very least, should Google recognize that this is a major change in the equation, let the user know that permission to show you a photo from another user gives them permission to suck up and analyze all your photos.
They could’ve used less innocuous language for something so comprehensive.
This doesn’t match my experience. I’ve granted Google Photos access to my photo library but also told it not to upload. It has a facility for browsing local photos without uploading them, and you can then choose to upload individual photos if you want.
It seems though, that doing the uploading may be the default, or that whether to upload is presented to the user in a very suggestive way (say, big blue “Start Using” button and tiny text link for “enable later”). This may or may not be considered a “dark pattern” depending on whether you basically trust Google. For many, I suspect, getting a free cloud backup of what may be their most precious data, especially on iOS where Apple provides next to zero on its free tier, would be a feature they may end up being very thankful for in the event of phone breakage.
Not saying I agree 100% with them pushing this, but just pointing this out.
Agree 100%. I see now that iOS 11 splits photo permissions into “Read & Write” and “Add Photos Only.” That’s a start, but the first permission is far too broad. Also, many apps still request the most broad permissions they can get away with, even when not needed.
The vast majority of apps (photo editors, social media, etc) only need access to specific photos selected by the user. This could be done without any permission setting needed – just put up a system dialog to select photos, and the app *only* gets those selected. Additionally, the dialog should include an option at the top – default ON – to strip any geolocation data before handing off the photos to the third party app.
Apple is advertising themselves as protecting the user’s privacy, in contrast to Google, but it’s really frustrating to see them ignore such obvious enhancements to privacy. They may still be better than Android in this regard (I’m not even sure about more recent versions of Android) but that’s not saying much.
I get the heebie-jeebies every time I have to give an app access to my entire library, just to allow it to read the one photo I’m willing to hand over. Who knows what it’s doing with the rest of my library? I shouldn’t have to feel paranoid wondering about that.