Slashdot Mirror
Picasa Rolls Out 3.0 — Now With Facial Recognition
eldavojohn writes "If you use Picasa (Google's photo sharing site), they have upgraded to 3.0 and are purportedly offering facial recognition. That's right, why tag photos of your friends when the software will group similar faces together for you? There's a new list of features including repairing old photographs by touching them up and even writing on your images. As expected, not everyone is 'ok' with Google automatically recognizing you in pictures."
picasas?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Cool technology. I can imagine it now.....Google becomes the premier private security company.....
'Number-memorizing Chinese people.'-Anon
It can sort my porn.
checkout the error message it throws on a goatse image :P
By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through Picasa Web Albums, you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, adapt, distribute and publish such Content through Picasa Web Albums, including RSS or other content feeds offered through Picasa Web Albums, and other Google services. In addition, by submitting, posting or displaying Content which is intended to be available to the general public, you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, adapt, distribute and publish such Content for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting Google services.
Google's Picasa is a photo-manipulation application that you download to your computer and install so you can manipulate images. It includes the capability of uploading those files to PicasaWeb, which is actually the photo-sharing site...
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Picasa is not creepy at all. It's one of the few products from Google pack that I use on a regular basis. It's nice being able to see all the pictures on your computer from one place. It occasionally sometimes takes a really long time to start up though.
...but you can still sort by actor.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I'm waiting for Google Earth integration, where it matches your face with images on street view and finds you on planet earth.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Zero factorial is one.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
to find out if you tag someone mooning the camera, if the facial recognition will eventually 'recognize' a friends face.
Considering that members of a family typically bear a very strong resemblance to one another (with identical twins being the extreme case), I would think this would be one of the tougher trials for a facial recognition algorithm.
Better known as 318230.
the fact that the Department of Homeland Security has been spending millions and possibly billions on face recognizing cameras for cities around the nation.
It wouldn't be too difficult for the DHS to take the information from google and incorporate it in their own databases.
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
It's not from the insert-joke-here department. It's not from any department!! AIIEEEEE!!!
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
How is this not a violation of basic data protection laws in numerous jurisdictions (like, say, pretty much all of Europe)?
This is the curse of social networking sites generally: you don't have to be the person providing personal information about yourself, because chances are your well-meaning friends will do it for you.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
This was one of my favorite programs when I was on Windows, and I miss its use on my mac. I enjoy iPhoto, but Picasa just had so many features that I loved and used and find so much better than iPhoto. Things like watching folders to see when new pictures were added, moved, and deleted. Cmon google...
I can see a divorce lawyer or journalist finding pictures of someone in a Vegas club or some bar drinking or flirting. They may get in trouble when they get back home.
I bet my employer searches my name every now ans then, if I did something questionable and a picture was taken and put on-line, that isn't very good.
I'm not thrilled that Picasa will probably update itself without asking my permission. I seem to remember that happened once before. Seeing as how I need to use Picasa this afternoon, I'll have to de-network the computer first.
I'm REALLY worried that one day the old MusicMatch Jukebox v8 that came with my 4-year-old Dell will be remotely disabled somehow one day because I refuse to upgrade to yahoo or whatever it's turned into now. It seems to randomly connect somewhere and issue "friendly reminders" to me to upgrade. No way, Jose.
Speaking of Google, am I the only person not even remotely interested in their new chrome browser? Probably.
From TFA:
This is why you raise your child with a "whitelist" concept of who is a family friend. That's how my parents did it, and how most people did it when I was growing up. If I didn't know you, guess what? That meant you didn't come around enough to know you were a family friend, and no friend of my parents would have been upset if I didn't trust them and we'd never met. Why? Family friends understand that sort of thing from little kids who may have met them at most once or twice. Most of the problems should go away when they hit the teenage years because by that time, they can be reasonably expected to be able to figure these things out, and make their own way home.
I don't trust Google, but give it a rest with the sex offender crap. If your kids fall prey to this, it's your fault, not Google's fault because you should have taught them to only trust "friends of the family" that you introduced them to.
I am aware that Flickr is owned by Yahoo. I'm curious as to whether or not it is possible for this sort of Picasa tagging to spill over into Flickr. I'm also curious about the effect of the taggings of large porn collections (both pro and amateur) when these tags become public.
from TFA:
"There's no telling if the facial recognition technology will be able to accurately identify each person in a picture, but it does suffer from a setback that may annoy users: it works best when a person is facing the camera and will have trouble identifying them if they're not." .. no shit?
My wife is:
1) a shutterbug
2) a packrat
3) totally disorganized
the ability to type in "find R3.0" and have it come up with all the pics of my son would make my life a lot easier.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
I can understand Picasa auto-tagging, that actually sounds like a nice feature. But why would this be a rights violation, or applicable to the YRO section at all? As long as you use Picasa as a picture album and don't let it integrate with web services automatically, you shouldn't have a problem. And if you do allow it to... maybe it's time to re-examine what information you entrust to a computer's discretion.
Facial recognition software is not trivial. Especially accurate facial recognition. I wonder if it is a licensed library.
Otherwise who cares? Seriously. If you think that Google is somehow the first to do this you would be very, very, wrong. This is water that went under the bridge a looong time ago at a national intelligence scale. Don't jump to the conclusion that it is used everywhere though... But understand that it has been commercially available to governments for a long time.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
...would make a priceless /. headline.
Sigh - Picasa is the one app that I really missed when I moved to a Mac. I loved it. And years later it's still Windows only...
Three Squirrels
It doesn't seem they yet support the ability to write EXIF data - which is important to me so that when I add metadata (such as date to scanned pictures) I don't get locked in to always using picasa in order to have that info. anybody can tell if they have/ have not got this working? (my windows machine is not easily accessible right now)
How do you try this feature out? I RTFA, WVFYTV (*** you tube video), read the new feature page (which as far as I can see, doesn't mention this feature), did a few searches on the feature, then installed picasa 3 and fiddled with tagging photos, but no tag suggestions have come up. Can someone please enlighten me as to how this works?
Probably they can take the raw pictures far before this, and do their own face recognition.
Is not the government that you must be afraid of, putting this in hands of everyone will ease a lot of things for normal people, and as tools, can be used with good and wrong intentions, and even be "accidents" making easier to see the right people in the wrong places or viceversa.
I thought zero! was just excited.
I need this for indexing my porn.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Really? Privacy, a big concern because you can choose to download a piece of software that will attempt to recognize your face? Or *gasp* a friend could import a photo of you into said software? Without your written consent? The Horror! Won't somebody please think of the children!
You think I'm exaggerating, but TFA actually says:
This is also a larger issue for parents with small children. Other family members could tag photos of your child on the Internet. If a predator were to find pictures labeled with a location and a full name, he could gather enough information on your child to pose as a family friend in an attempt to lure your child from safety. What is Google's advice on keeping your children safe?
Now will you please explain to me how this is more of a concern than some random friend tagging said photos without the use of Google's software?
I'm all for privacy, but this seems like a white whale. Nobody's forcing you to use Picasa, and there's really nothing intrusive about this application of the technology. I think it's just the phrase, "Facial Recognition" that brings to mind images of big brother.
Let's try and do a better job of picking our battles.
Mod my comments down. It'll be fun.
The technology exists. It's out of the bag. It doesn't matter if Google does it -- if they don't, someone else will.
You have to assume that in a couple of years, someone can take a phone cam picture of you on the street and use it to trace you back to a Facebook page (or whatever). Or that the police can trace you back to your DMV photo.
If you can't handle that, stop posting pictures of yourself in a way that allows someone to tie them to your real name. And take down the ones that are already up there.
This is inevitable.
But unlike DHS, Google might manage to make the technology work.
..about moving to mac land is the lack of a Picasa variant native to os x. I know, I know, there is iPhoto, Aperture, etc. But what Picasa did so well was scan my server for any additions/deletions of photos. It was brainless. Something I still cannot believe has been implemented in the mac photo programs.
Conservative, mod down for violating
I'm not that worried. There are still some kinks to be worked out.
Picasaweb (Google's photo-sharing website) does the facial recognition, not the Picasa application. On the Picasaweb site, you can opt-in to the facial recognition stuff, and it will bulk process your uploaded photos. To use it you have upload some photos to the web first, using the Picasa app.
I have twenty sharp knives in my kitchen drawer. The idea and capacity for rape and murder are latent within me, but does that mean I should act upon them?
Just because this technology exists or its existence is "inevitable", does that mean anything? Is it not the use of technology, the action itself that we must consider?
Picasaweb (Google's photo-sharing website) does the facial recognition, not the Picasa application. On the Picasaweb site, you can opt-in to the facial recognition stuff, and it will bulk process your uploaded photos. To use it you have upload some photos to the web first, using the Picasa app.
well that's useful for those like me that have too many photos to store online. why can't they do it offline - do u need some sort of supercomputer to work this shit out?
I was watching a Dr. Phil show by chance about a week back that dealt with some girls posting questionable pictures of themselves (not naked, just.. plastered) on their Facebook/whatever, and discussing how that might impact their (future) lives - with one employer type guy saying that he will check you out on the internet and if he were to find stuff like that, not consider you for a job.
So Dr. Phil and some 'expert' went on to say that posting pictures like that is not good, blablabla; the same stuff parents would tell their children, I guess.
But what Anonymous Brave Guy mentioned was not even touched upon in the program; yes, it's stupid if you publish those pictures yourself, but what are you gonna do if somebody -else- posts those pictures?
Yes, you can ask them to take them down... maybe they will, maybe they won't.. in the latter case you might ask Facebook.. who may take them down, or not.. in the latter case you might have to sue, etc. But even if your friend does take them down... a friend of theirs may have already copied it to -their- facebook page. In no time, it can be in a hundred random places on the internet... and that employer-type guy is going to find it and not hire you. So what are you going to do against that? Check if anybody's taking pictures while you're plastered? Good luck doing that when every cellphone has a camera these days. Only get plastered while in a private setting? Most of these pictures -are- from private parties.
I guess the answer is "don't get plastered". Sadly, that means "Don't do anything whatsoever that, while innocuous, may be interpreted in such a way by other people as to form a negative opinion of you either personally or professionally". A boring life that'll be.
Back to the topic at hand; protecting your own privacy is all good and well, but in the end, if others are allowed to talk about you in the forum of a billion people that is the internet, you're bound to be screwed one way or another.
Its only available in the web albums. You should see the option once you go to your picasa home page.
"Either way, it's nice to see Google pull Picasa out of the doldrums and breathe some life into it. "
You know what Picasa could have used more than facial recognition -- Mac support. That would breathe real life into it.
Make sure you are viewing your gallery http://picasaweb.google.com/home?hl=en&tab=wq , as the facial recognition features is not in the "Public Gallery" section http://picasaweb.google.com/{USERNAME} . It is being hammered right now as my gallery of 500 photos has displayed: "Waiting to process photos (there may be a delay)" for the last 30 minutes.
You can filter to "Show only photos with faces", button is to the left of the search bar.
You have to modify Picasaweb settings to 'English US' then save/ok, go back to settings and now a 'Face tag' prefs exists
wolruf@gmail.com
Yeah but does Picasa finally support Color Management?
Does it support production quality image formats such as TGA, EXR, IFF, PIC, etc...
Picasa is a neat app, but its a toy. Why cant it be production ready too? I know as a 3d artist, i would love to have a nice way to catalogue all of my textures, renders etc all in a nice single smart searchable database... Besides vista search that is.
You're right, that this is just a change in the level of effort to get public photos tagged. I agree that it's not something people should freak out over because it destroys their privacy.
That said, changes in the level of effort to do something make all the difference in the world. Before the internet, I could go to a library and read books, magazines & newspapers on a topic. I could send people snail mail or call them. Being able to use the internet to do these things trivially is a quantitative difference that makes a huge qualitative difference.
Privacy will be nonexistent for our children. Video cameras and internet connections will be dirt cheap, and sharing video on the web will be trivial. Software to automatically recognize what's being done, and who's doing it, will be ubiquitous. Searching that information will be easy. Stitching together multiple video feeds to build viewpoints where no physical camera existed and continuous video when no single camera viewed all the action will be done for you, transparently.
People will mark up video and people with their thoughts & comments.
Everything you do that's visible from a public place, and most things you do anywhere else, will be common knowledge. Get used to it; it's unavoidable.
I might be misunderstanding how this works but I think the problem people have is that pictures and the resulting "fingerprints" end up in Google's database rather than just on your computer. This does seem to have the potential for misuse. Remember, you're not the only one who has pictures of you.
I work at a sewage treatment plant, so needless to say, I was VERY excited about this release right until I realized it said that *faces* are recognized. Bummer. So I guess I'll have to wait until version 4 to get my taxonomy project underway.
As there are no valid links in any of the pages linked in the story, I managed to find one manually:
http://dl.google.com/picasa/picasa3-setup.exe
Trolls are like broken clocks. They show the truth two times a day. The rest of the day they talk nonsense.
http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=14605&hl=en_US
It is a feature of Picasa Web Albums apparently, which you can turn on or leave off in your settings.
Now they'll know who that Rockefeller guy REALLY is.
Every time you call tech support, a little kitten dies.
running under wine does the job, but when are we going to see a real native linux port?
If not even google takes linux seriously enough to port its main applications (picasa, gtalk, still no chrome out while ff can roll out the builds for both platforms evenly), no wonder linux still does not cut it for the desktop for average users :(
I had no idea you could identify a male pornstar from their facials. What an odd feature to include in a public photo app...
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
Picasa is Free. Free!=production ready in most cases. Yes, I know linux is free, air is free and so are many other things. However, most FREE software is not made with the professional, full time user in mind. Get over it and get a job. Photoshop isn't THAT expensive. Besides, there's apps like Bibble that are VERY reasonable
Damnit I took the troll bait. I'm done for.
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
All I have to do is start tagging pictures of people who aren't me as me, and pictures of me as people who aren't me... Problem solved.
Has anyone noticed that Picasa's logo looks suspiciously like that of Aperture Science? Suspicious...
I'd hate to see the birthday celebrations on the Picasa devteam... I dunno, but I prefer my birthday cake to be true.
A regular user can get the RESULT of face recognition, i.e. get a face tagged automatically. To get the actual data that lets you do the face recognition yourself on your own images, that requires access to Google's code and data.
So, DHS can do what you and I already can do, without additional legal compulsion.
I'm a bit confused. I RTFA, and I can't tell if this is a PicasaWeb feature or a Picasa feature. If Web, then I can see the concern. If Picasa feature, I couldn't care less. Also, with all the concern flying around, can you not control the feature at all?
infaces: "neanderthal man"
i wonder whos face (bush) would show up first
Beware the EULA for Chrome in which Google claims rights to all your content, including picasa posts: 11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights that you already hold in Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content, you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/03/google_chrome_eula_sucks/
why is there no linux version 3 given version 2 had one?
The younger generations now that are growing up with cellphone cameras are about all posting wild ass pics of themselves online. "Employers" are going to have no choice in hiring, once everyone they google and check on pretty much has party pics to find. And for that matter, those kids BECOME the employers of tomorrow, they are going to not hire themselves? The previous generations going back to caveman days all did similar, it just wasn't as easy to take digital snaps and stick them someplace. And like, who cares really?
Dr. Phil is "entertainment", not science, and not economics. And any employer out there today who doesn't want to hire someone merely based on whether or not they party or are actually like young people fooling around and having some fun at one point is most likely a hypocrite. And verily I will say unto you: I am in the boomer generation,and will attest that any boomer employer right now who is still that stuck up is (odds > 99%) both a liar and a hypocrite along with being just stupid. Or just really really strange, someone you wouldn't want to work for anyway (every generation has it's share of 'tards). And that goes for boomer politicians, business leaders and so on. If they didn't party, they were some really weird people. And if they claim they didn't party, don't leave a room you are in with them without checking if you still have your wallet...
You hire people primarily based on whether or not they can do the job for you. To think they aren't human outside of worktime is looney tunes.
ha! Historical parallel. My dad used to razz me unmercifully in the 60s about what I looked like and so on, UNTIL my aunt, his older sister, showed me a pic of him dressed in a *zoot suit*. DAMN that was some funny stuff! I showed that to him, that's it, he never razzed me again!
Chevette Washington has some experience with this and it wasn't good.
Let's make it illegal to be child predator, with harsh prison sentences and, ...
Oh, wait. It's already illegal.
Well, that should be a good deterrent.
Oh, wait. That doesn't seem to work so well.
Then let's make it difficult for people WHO ARE NOT child predators.
THAT will work! Good thinking! We can do the same for Homeland Security!
When I was a kid, the rule was don't go through a door or climb into a car. It's a good rule. One of my most formative experiences occurred when I was about four. I was living in a beach side motel in south California. I suspect that my father was doing something at the Skunkworks. Anyway the rule there was that at the west end the elevator was off limits alone, because it led directly to the beach, and at the east end the limit was the swimming pool. One day I was confronted by a man with a handtruck loaded with boxes, and he asked me to hold open a door just southeast of the line, but safely away from the pool, which was the danger. I did it and I am not ashamed.
All your database are belong to U.S.
You are correct sir, millions, possibly billions, of people will mindlessly put their faces into a google facial database, thus providing Buhs and fascist scum like him with a powerful tool for social control. We will be trading basic freedom for the ability to find pictures of our friends. It is a virtual certainty that by hook or by crook, DHS, NSA and CIA will have those data. More likely the google will just give it to them. They've done it before... "The intelligence community appears to be interested in data mining Googleâ(TM)s vast store of information on each user who uses Googleâ(TM)s services. Google collects data on each userâ(TM)s search queries, which web sites users visited after making a query, and through its Google Analytics service, can also track users on cooperating web sites." http://www.homelandstupidity.us/2006/02/22/google-in-bed-with-us-intelligence/ -- Not happy with supporting nascent fascism in America, Larry and Sergey are busy helping the Red Chinese. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4645596.stm I can't find anything about this as it seems to have gone down the memory hole, but shortly after 9/11 there were reports that Microsoft was sharing source code with the FBI. Is Windows bugged? Almost certainly. As number 6 said, "Be seeing you!".
I think they read my post...
I made a comment to this article about "Computer Scientists Scour Your Holiday Photos"
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/18/1323224
and here's my post:
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=587635&cid=23843099
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
I know this is a bit late in the game but you'd probably be interested in reading the article "China's All-Seeing Eye" by Naomi Klein, it's pretty scary what's going on...
After reading a story today on Chrome, it pointed to the defintions at the top, being 1.1:
1.1 Your use of Googleâ(TM)s products, software, services and web sites (referred to collectively as the âoeServicesâ in this document and excluding any services provided to you by Google under a separate written agreement) is subject to the terms of a legal agreement between you and Google. ...
9.1 You acknowledge and agree that Google (or Googleâ(TM)s licensors) own all legal right, title and interest in and to the Services, including any intellectual property rights which subsist in the Services (whether those rights happen to be registered or not, and wherever in the world those rights may exist). ... ...
9.4 Other than the limited license set forth in Section 11, Google acknowledges and agrees that it obtains no right, title or interest from you (or your licensors) under these Terms in or to any Content that you submit, post, transmit or display on, or through, the Services, including any intellectual property rights which subsist in that Content (whether those rights happen to be registered or not, and wherever in the world those rights may exist). Unless you have agreed otherwise in writing with Google, you agree that you are responsible for protecting and enforcing those rights and that Google has no obligation to do so on your behalf.
11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This licence is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.
Now forgive me for being picky, but picasa includes software that functions as a picture "viewer"... which to me implies anytime you use that to look at local pics (that you never upload), you automatically give Google the right to see that picture, regardless of whether or not it appears on the Interweb. Of course that begs the question of how they'd go about doing that but it doesn't seem beyond belief that they could take you to court and sue you, under this contract, for access to all of your images.
As expected, not everyone is 'ok' with Google automatically recognizing you in pictures.
Unless Google have turned into the Internet morons that Microsoft were in the 90's, surely they knew this would be the case.
Facial recognition in photography has to be the #1 feature that NOBODY asked for...why in heck is it being pimped on consumers so hard?? (Both in hardware and software.)
-Matt
I think this is an another example of IT disappearing up its own rear end for a while. If this code was locally installed, whether on a laptop or even a personal server, it would just be seen as a Good Feature. Having locally run solutions means if the code is not open it is at least easier to monitor what that code is doing, and allows the small costs of running the software to be confined and not bloat into management costs for the millions.
IT can do all sorts of stuff needless or otherwise for us, and there would be no problems if it was only for us, and not the life of global billion dollar industries. Having to think twice about implementing every geek fantasy due to online trust issues has got to be a drain. Can't we see that the most important war in IT (and maybe everything) is education? Having your diary, mail, and photo album managed by a company is like saying it's we should all be chauffeured to work and have people come clean our clothes just because it's too difficult to learn how to do it yourself. My hope is that like those examples maintaining personal IT services will will become common knowledge and sense. Monopoly of education is the worse thing that can happen to IT and will stifle a potential global thinktank as long as it exists. These services don't run themselves for free and people should be shown that for the better.
So we spent billions in tax dollars in bad attempts to create reliable government software for facial recognition and Google did it because my wife clicks all the Google Ads? Hey, maybe the government should make an agreement with Google to have every Tax payer click on 'x' number of ads everyday to cover our tax bills. We could even help the government set up the link farms to spam the other search engines....
ed duval the very last person
Ahh, thanks. The article title and TFA are inaccurate, calling "Picasa Web Album" "Picasa". Bummer, was hoping it was done locally.
I'm not talking about editing. FUCK editing. I know photoshop inside and out since version 2. Thats not what i'm talking about. I'm saying the specific nature of being able to catalogue a lot of images on disc, including all of the various formats used, such as tga, exr, pic, iff, map, etc. A way to browse through them nicely and maintain meta data with them.
There are no really good image asset management apps.
Picasa, is a toy. It shouldnt be used by anyone because it lacks color management and format support. Grandma isnt shooting hundreds of thousands of images, she doesnt neeed a huge search able database.
People dealing with lots of images need search able databases...
...Because I just spent 5 minutes getting rid of that shit. Scheduled tasks to start something that didn't start at startup. I'm fed up with Google. The only thing they offer that I'm actually interested in is web search. For everything else there's a simpler more reliable or more feature complete alternative.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
So now they can refine their algorithms with masses and masses of test data
If you need free spies all over the world, just make a EEEEEEEASY to leak data. That's what they do all over the place.
I'd have to disagree (though I would have completely agreed up until about a month ago). Lightroom 2 does almost everything that I'm looking for with the exception of allowing me to add data from my GPS device to my photos.
Has Picasa finally got to the point where it won't crash any more if you're not Administrator when you run it under Windows?
This is the moment that Google becomes officially more evil than Microsoft. Congratulations.
If you change your language to lets say English UK, FACE tag is disabled.
To re-enable it, change your language again to ENGLISH US.
SCIREV.NET - fanfics,reviews & more
I understand what you're saying, I just think it lets people off the hook even though they are in the business of doing things that are likely to be based on harmful or distressing actions a significant proportion of the time.
If you come into possession of stolen property, then in most places you are not automatically guilty of an offence if it was an innocent transaction, but you are required to return the property. Moreover, if you picked it up under dubious circumstances (e.g., high-tech equipment or designer labels for 10% the usual price), then you may have a hard job arguing that you didn't realise it was probably stolen and you are innocent of all wrong-doing. This means you can't "commission" a theft, but then wash your hands of it if you are discovered.
As I understand it, courts in most Western jurisdictions generally rule similarly on propagation of legally privileged information. If you're a magazine editor and you publish information that you would reasonably be expected to know was proprietary and had been leaked illegally, then this does not give you a "free speech" pass on sharing it further. Likewise, if a court has ordered a ban on publishing the names of, say, child defendants, then you can't publish them in a national newspaper just because you didn't get them directly from the court but you overhead someone talking about them outside.
And free speech is not an absolute when it affects other people, either. We have slander and libel laws for this very reason. We also have harassment laws that guard against prolonged courses of action generally likely to cause someone distress without a good reason.
These analogies are not perfect, but my point is that other existing laws deliberately don't create a "firewall" of blame, where someone is free to knowingly do something likely to be harmful without any regard for the consequences of their actions. Nor do laws in any jurisdiction I know provide for absolute freedom of expression with no regard for the consequences. I find it strange that we would expect invasion of privacy not to come up to the same standards.
It's not like there's even much downside to this approach. Who really needs to publish a picture of someone else who was caught doing something embarrassing using a telephoto lens, or by a van covered in cameras driving down their street, or by a phone or other similarly small camera they didn't know was present? In general, there is no great public interest in seeing someone who looks like they were plastered (but perhaps were just ill that day), or in a state of undress they didn't expect anyone else to be able to see, or going into some financial organisation, medical facility, or other sensitive place. You could remove most of the unpleasant photos posted on the Internet without consent and replace them with the tag "andnothingofvaluewaslost", and this would make a lot of people's lives a little bit happier.
Why can't we have a presumption of privacy, such that posting photographs likely to be harmful or distressing to someone in the photograph without their consent is against the rules, and anyone who wants to do it has to show a compelling public interest (e.g., that the photograph shows an elected official who is claiming they support a certain position in public but privately going against it)? That way, there is no excuse for anyone, anywhere along the chain, to share things like photos that are likely to cause harm or distress.
We used to call this "minding your own business", "respecting someone's privacy" or simply "common courtesy". It is regrettable that in the Internet-enabled, "I deserve to see everything", "information wants to be free" era we seem to have forgotten how to treat fellow human beings in our self-righteous belief that just because we can do something, that means we should do it. I do not think this makes the world a better place.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Can it handle 14-bit RAW files of the sort that Picasa 2.0 chokes on?
Run perfectly under wine (MacPorts) on Leopard. I refuse to even try to install Google Earth under wine for geotagging, though. Why hasn't this been ported to Mac/Linux natively yet? It's so much more intuitive that any other photo managing software out there and great for noobs!
G have many solid product offerings, but fail miserably at providing an integrated/seamless experience across those offerings.
Picasaweb is still missing the obvious benefits of integrating Analytics... A quick look at the picasa community board turns up 100s of requests for trend/web tracking of album/photo views.
Enabling google analytics in picasa must be a trivial task, yet there's no official answer for why they haven't done so.
How can anyone recommend Picasa over flickr, or even facebook for that matter, until they are little more customer focused, and address the quick wins that their user base is asking for. ...rant (conscious raising warning) over.
This way we can blame the machine. Huge difference to those more concerned with appearance than reality.
I am indeed one.