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?