Why I Won’t Be Using Google Photos
Until, of course, my daughter is old enough to tell me I’m being stupid.
I am an early adopter, a conscientious user, and a happy consumer of Google products. As such, I paid close attention to what was being announced at Google I/O this year and, as per usual, I was very impressed with a lot of the products they announced. Android M looks like a great step forward for the OS, Android Pay will bring seamless payments to more people worldwide, and Google Now On Tap looks immensely important to protect Google’s business model in mobile.
This year’s Google I/O marked a first for me, though — it was the first time I saw a Google product that didn’t clear the value hurdle for me. This product is Google Photos, and I won’t be using it.
When I talk about the value hurdle I talk about the tradeoff everyone makes when they decide to use any of a variety of free internet-enabled services. Each of these free services — Facebook, Twitter, Mint, Gmail — needs to provide enough value to their users to allow them to give up their data to the companies that built these services. This data is then monetized by those companies in a variety of ways. To clear the value hurdle, the value your product provides must be greater than the unease your customers might feel with you monetizing their data.
Google is extremely adept at clearing this hurdle.
The 425+ million gmail users all decided (consciously or not) to allow Google to read all their emails and agree to see ads relevant to the contents of that email in exchange for the ability to use a really great web mail product. When I go to Google Maps, locations I have googled in the past are conveniently highlighted for me automatically.
What Google Photos provides for its users is unlimited free storage for all of your high quality photos and videos as well as advanced indexing and features like searching your photos by subject or location. For example, you can search for all photos in your collection that contain dogs, search for all photos that appear to be selfies, or search for all photos of your wife.
I think the service looks amazing and solves a very real problem — having enough storage to store the thousands of photos people are taking with their phones AND giving them the power of Google search to find the right ones when you’re looking for them.
I have these problems too, but I still can’t bring myself to use it. Here’s why:
My wife and I had a baby girl 9 months ago. For anyone that has had a child recently, you know what that does to your photo stream.
It is a total takeover. Our dog didn’t stand a chance.
If I decided to upload all of these photos to Google, the service would (very conveniently) upload them to Google’s servers, crawl each and every one, and analyze the content of all those photos. They would then create a category approximating “pictures of my daughter”. Side note: This is a rather futile task, as a Venn diagram of all my photos and the photos of my daughter is a near perfect circle, but it (theoretically) makes it easier to find pictures of her.
It is at this point that Google now starts collecting data on my daughter. It is at this point that Google starts thinking about how to best deliver ads to her.
Granted, Google is not asking me to name her, or link her photos to a Google account, or do anything else that would point to the (admittedly) worst case scenario I lay out above. All of the data collection and analyzing is all in the name of my convenience, but in this case it is not my privacy I’m worried about — it’s hers. This is what keeps the service from clearing the value hurdle for me.
By asking me to make the tradeoff — giving Google access to my photos in exchange for unlimited free storage of photos and innovative new features — it is also asking me to compromise the privacy of my daughter as well. This is because I am giving Google access to her likeness, her location, her acquaintances, her anything.
I’m happy to make this tradeoff for myself, but I should not be in the position to make this decision for her (or anyone else).
To be fair, Google has made specific statements about preserving the privacy of this data specifically. From Backchannel’s (excellent) interview with Bradley Horowitz (Google’s head of Streams, Photos and Sharing) when asked about whether the face recognition in this product understands who the person actually is:
Not in this incarnation of the product. If you look at the faces we have here Google has no idea who these people are, it’s actually face clustering, not face-recognition, so I can click on my stepdaughter Charlotte and see other pictures of her. But it doesn’t know Charlotte’s identity [and can’t make use of any of her own personal information].
That’s encouraging, but not enough. How difficult do you think it would be for Google to correlate the images of my wife in my photo collection to the selfies she’s uploaded to her own account? For Google? Not hard. It’s called Big Data, and they’ve been doing it since before it had a name.
To add fuel to my dystopian outlook, here’s a quote when asked specifically about whether or not Google Photos data was going to be used anywhere else.
“The information gleaned from analyzing these photos does not travel outside of this product — not today”
The “not today” is a bit disconcerting, and he goes on to say:
But if I thought we could return immense value to the users based on this data I’m sure we would consider doing that
He describes a scenario where if Google could tell from your photos that you had a Tesla, they could alert you to a recall. That sounds noble enough, but just as likely is a scenario where they would deliver you an advertisement for things that Tesla owners are likely to click on — like Tesla home batteries, or high end sunglasses, or ads for tesla-specific mechanics. In fact, Horowitz himself calls Google Photos the “Gmail for Your Images” pointing to the fact that we can expect the tradeoff for the unlimited storage to be the delivery of ads based on the image data.
It’s just ads, though, right? I see them every day. In my email, on the web, I hear them in my podcasts. What’s the big deal? This is different.
This is different because these ads could be delivered based on the subject’s physical appearance.
Ads today are delivered on various demographic stats like age, sex, income bracket, interest, etc. As far as I can tell, this would be the first opportunity (at massive scale) to add physical appearance to that list.
Were my pessimistic outlook to transpire, this would have huge implications for everyone. I am not overly worried about it, however, as long as it is a user’s conscious decision to use the product because it clears the value hurdle for them. I only start to worry when I think about my daughter’s data being collected if I (or anyone else that takes photos of her) agree to use the product.
Look. I don’t know what it’s like to have grown up a girl, or what it will be like to grow up a girl in the 2010's and 2020's. I also don’t have a good idea of what it will take for me to raise my daughter and be a good father and feminist in this decade or the next. I’m figuring it out one day at a time, and all I can do is my best. One thing I do know is that today, advertising is high on the list of endeavors that reinforce a bevy of unwelcome (and often unhealthy) expectations of women.
We don’t currently lack opportunities to make women feel inadequate based on appearance. I am not willing to facilitate a new one.
Ok — give me a second to get down off my soap box… ok, there. Thanks.
The most likely outcome here, of course, is that my fears are totally unfounded. She probably won’t be the first, but it is very likely that my daughter will eventually tell me I am being stupid and an “old man”. That she loves Google Photos and she wishes I had uploaded photos of her as a baby so she could easily find them rather then backing them up to archaic external hard drives. And, of course I would totally cave, because she’s my daughter and I would do anything for her.
Until that happens, I’m perfectly happy to hold off on signing up.
