Google photos does AI so you can search for terms like 'cats' and all the pictures of cats show up. They also have other behavioral things like "hey remember this photo from a year ago" or "hey did you want to share this photo?". This is all based on data in the photos.

So if Google runs analysis on your photos, in their cloud, in a manner that doesn't cross information with other users, then we could consider this functionally equivalent to a system that runs it entirely on your device.

In many ways this is similar to search indexing for gmail, and other 'assistant' behaviors such as "you didnt reply to this, do you want to?" prompts.

This is the entire underlying premise and promise of SaaS and "the cloud".

I do think the well has been poisoned here in HN, using conspiracy like thinking, poor reasoning, and generally doubling down on confirmation bias. Some people hold Google to a higher standard of proof than anything else in their life - while a sign of mistrust, it is often based on wild accusations and bad faith arguments, eg: in this case lawsuits from ORACLE of all companies (literally the poster child for bad corporate culture, sexism at the CEO level, and sneaky business practices!).

What does Oracle’s alleged bad behaviour have to do with the merits of discussing Google’s alleged bad behaviour?

Arguably the big guys being at war with each other is one of the few saving graces for all of us little fish.

Sometimes the accusations they throw at each other will have merit, and other times not so much. Each accusation therefore deserves separate consideration.

That's basically the argument. I find it incredibly useful to me personally, but when people ask "How do we guarantee Google doesn't share data between accounts," the answer definitely is "We trust Google at their word."

What does google maps have to do with google photos? I didn't upload my library into google photos. I selected a single picture to attach to a review.

I think I may misunderstand what you are saying:

>I uploaded a picture to google maps as part of a review

You uploaded a photo to a public service, cool:

>Google had been rifling through my personal pictures

Not sure how that follows. Did google take a different photo from your phone and I'm misunderstanding you?

OP is pretty clear.

> About a month later I get an actual notification on my phone - hey do you want to share this picture you took in City Park last weekend?

He took a picture and put it on a public service. A month later that service asks him if he wants to share a picture that he took last weekend. Since last weekend cannot be as far away as a month ago one can not conclude anything else then that we are talking about a different photo.

Oh, now I understand.

I'm pretty sure that's the local Google Maps client app rifling through the locally-stored photos (because it has permission to see the metadata for photos on the device). I can see how one could find that creepy, though I think it's relatively harmless. Is the specific issue that one doesn't want Maps to be able to infer you took a photo at location Y just because you once uploaded a photo at location X? Is the issue server-side Maps making the inference or client-side Maps (b/c client-side knows where you are and can see your photo metadata, so it doesn't actually need a server in the loop to ask that question)?

Yes. The issue is I gave it permission to access my photos so I could add a review (for the post office). But weeks later it was going through my photos without my permission. It must have either recognized a popular statue or building, or used the exif data to determine the location. From there it decided to interrupt my day and make a suggestion based on some algorithm. Maybe it noticed I go to the park a lot and thought I should review that place.

Whatever, I don't care. I could infer now that my entire photo library has been uploaded to google and is in some database somewhere. Or that every picture has been scraped for location data and recognizable landmarks, and all of that data is somewhere on google.

Whatever it is, I'm freaking disgusted.

That visceral response is on a sliding scale and different people have different responses. That's one of the tough things about designing software for mass consumption; people actually love that feature too (they have the data to know, both through use of the feature and user testimonial).

Seeking the balance point is an ongoing process.

The issue is a utility app doing anything other than what the user explicitly requests. I use a maps app to look at maps; it has no business doing anything with my photos.

Other people may use it for other things— that’s fine, as long as it behaves itself on my device when I don’t use those features.

Well, one uses Google Maps to look at maps and to upload photos of places; those are two features that app has.

Right, but an app shouldn’t be spying on me to support a feature I don’t actively use. If they want to include it in the binary for other people to use, I don’t have a big problem with that as long as it stays off.

A corollary is that the app shouldn’t ask for a permission until the user has asked it to do something that will obviously require that permission.

In general, I agree. In this specific context, the suggestion feature appears to have been enabled as a result of the user uploading a photo. It's reasonable to assume if they uploaded one, they'll want to upload more in the future (and decrease the friction of doing that).

Oh; I had assumed that the original upload was from a computer, but they didn’t actually say that, did they?

Depending on your camera settings, your camera will attach lat-lon in the metadata of the photo when it takes the photo.

Google doesn't have to rifle through anything; from the application's point of view, that information is as clear as the filename and the color of the top-left pixel.

I've had Google correctly identify location for photos taken on a dumb camera with no location Metadata.

I use Google photos to store, organise and back-up my photos. My camera does not have geotagging. And they do infer the geolocation (city/region) based on the GPS data from my phone at the time the photo was taken. If I change the metadata, the location changes.

I have mixed feelings about sharing my location with Google at all times, but this one feature is actually very useful to me, and provides real value.

That's interesting, and I wonder how they do that. Things I'd want to know include:

* what app you used to upload the image to Google

* what Google app / service identified the image

* how you uploaded it (i.e. if you uploaded it via a smartphone with location services on, I imagine Google is allowed to say "Hey, this upload is being done at this lat/lon, which I've determined either from GPS or from cell and wifi triangulation").