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> Why would I hand over my photos to a third party, that, quite ostensibly, is capable of indexing and tagging it by face- and location-recognition and store on their storage

Many people consider all of those to be features: cloud storage means you don't lose things when your phone is stolen or your laptop dies and most people have far more photos than they have the tools or time to organize. Intelligently clustering them based on location, faces, content type, etc. benefits from lots of CPU time and a big training corpus, which is exactly what Google excels at.

That's not to say that there aren't valid concerns about privacy but look at how many people use Gmail or Facebook to estimate what percentage of the computer using public considers that a reasonable deal for a free service.

1. The 99.9% that don't care about Google tracking them will have a use for it. Every product has its abstainers.

Post Snowden this percentage has decreased.

98.82 now.

> 1. Why would I hand over my photos to a third party, that, quite ostensibly, is capable of indexing and tagging it by face- and location-recognition and store on their storage. I used to trust Google with most of my information, but I've been slowly transitioning them away to either local, or a home-brew solution.

For the same reason you'd hand over your email to them? Fast, UI, search, cloud whatever, etc etc. If you don't trust them with that, though, then yes, it follows quite naturally you shouldn't give them your photos. Not really a shocker.

Google tracks what physical retail stores you visit[1][2] on Android phones and iPhones(if you use Google Maps app). People don't care about that, do you think really think they will care about photos? Actually, scratch that, most people don't even know that Google tracks your phone location for store visits if you use location services or Google Now.

>Google cited two case studies of retailers that have been testing this metric. PetSmart’s estimated store visits data showed that 10 to 18 percent of clicks on search ads lead to a store visit.

[1] http://digiday.com/platforms/google-tracking/

[2] http://searchengineland.com/google-store-visits-estimated-co...

> Actually, scratch that, most people don't even know that Google tracks your phone location for store visits if you use location services or Google Now.

If you use Google Now, Google autorecommends locations -- including retail stores -- that you might want travel time to based on its tracking, so its pretty hard not to be aware that it is doing the tracking.

>If you use Google Now, Google autorecommends locations -- including retail stores -- that you might want travel time to based on its tracking, so its pretty hard not to be aware that it is doing the tracking.

I've noticed with that, every time it surprises someone, they call it creepy, but they don't turn it off and then get used to it. Myself included.

I was creeped out at first, but then I realized that Verizon already has all the same data, and I trust Google way more than I trust Verizon.

Does Verizon also have your emails, your photos, a large sample of your browsing history, your search history, what videos you watch online -- not sure what I'm forgetting -- oh yeah, and of course the data analysis skills to interconnect all those vast amounts of data, make educated guesses about the pieces they don't have yet, and a business model that centers around it?

Since I browse, search, and watch videos on my phone, they have a decent amount of that information. But where Google will correlate all of that data in order to show me advertisements, Verizon will modify my traffic to make me more trackable and then sell my data to other advertisers.

> Why would I hand over my photos to a third party, that, quite ostensibly, is capable of indexing and tagging it by face- and location-recognition and store on their storage.

"You're the product". I guess the data is used to enhance machine learning, that's why they also offer "unlimited" storage now (although it's compressed with yet to see what quality).

I wonder though if the image indexing etc will have the ability to opt-out from. There's also a question if there will be a good syncing tool to upload existing photos from the desktop device and keep it synced, Google Drive and Photos didn't like each other in the past.

Please don't say "you're the product". Not only is this line absurdly overused, it's also thoughtless, lazy, and wrong. You are not the product. You are a person. You are not being bought, you are not being sold. Nobody can exchange clear legal title to your very existence because slavery is illegal and has been for some time.

"Okay, fine so what IS changing hands when money is being made?"

Well, that depends. Generally it's one of two things. The first is information about you (e.g. Experian, TransUnion, etc.). The other is access to you (e.g. Google, Facebook, etc.) But neither of these things are you, any more than a story about you (which may or may not be true) is you, per se.

This may seem persnickety, but failing to grasp this means failing to recognize some of the most fundamental points about the internet and information economies. And not really caring about the difference is a bit like saying that whether the Earth is flat or round doesn't really matter because from where you're standing it all looks the same. Like I said, it's just thoughtless, lazy, and wrong. And if there's one place where people really should know enough and care enough to get this right, it's HN.

</rant>

>Nobody can exchange clear legal title to your very existence because slavery is illegal and has been for some time.

You'd be surprised.

Modern slavery is a multi-billion dollar industry with estimates of up to $35 billion generated annually. The United Nations estimates that roughly 27 to 30 million individuals are currently caught in the slave trade industry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_slavery

Sure, but those are not people spending significant amounts of time on Google, FB, etc. Indeed, if you've enough online access for companies to build profiles on you, you're not a victim of the actual slave trade.

Billions of photos are on Facebook. Maybe trillions.

"what if we could use google's unique capabilities take back control of helpless people's digital lives?"

What I noticed for the first time is not the cool new shiny things, but the absence of Hangouts and Google+ features

I'm curious about Google Photos but if Google had proclaimed "you must be a Google+ user to get this" then I wouldn't even give it a try.

I could see it being a hook into Google+ at some later point in time if/when there's momentum.

Its moving in the opposite direction though so that doesn't make sense. It already was a Google+ integrated app and now its standalone.

Or, just as bad: they pull a Reader and sunset the service in 4 years once you've stuffed all of your photos into it.

My faith in Google's ability / willingness to support these types of projects long term is minimal at best.