What is the difference? All they are doing is giving you a different way of accessing them. It's the same bloody company! It's not like they've created and passed the photos on to someone else, they're just in a bucket with "picasa" written on it.

The difference is that the user never knew anything about the Picassa service. It should be their decision (not Google's) to add photo attachments to Picassa. It is unsettling to find your photo attachments in email (which most people consider private) suddenly placed in a photo app you've never accessed or may never have even heard of. The feature might be fine if you ask users for their permission. Doing it silently without their knowledge is just poor UX.

Google needs to make it much clearer that signing up to a Google account gives you access to all Google services. Their current sign-up page shows a line of tiny Google icons which completely fails to convey this. The icons are one image in a row, so you can't even hover over each icon to see a tooltip description of what they are. Once again, this is just clumsy UX.

In my view, if a user signs up for a particular service such as Gmail, only that service should be activated. Other Google services are only activated when you actually decide to use them (i.e. don't create an empty Google+ site for me unless I opt-in to using that service).

> Google needs to make it much clearer that signing up to a Google account gives you access to all Google services.

Perhaps this comes from different expectations. When I signed up with google this is exactly what I expected, to have access to every service they offered at that time and all future services.

> (i.e. don't create an empty Google+ site for me unless I opt-in to using that service).

This one I can see more (although I'm not sure quite what happens here, I'd need to create a new account and have a look).

I don't think that is the point being made. The point is that there's been a lack of transparency on Google's behalf, and a lot of users, like myself, have grown tired of it.

Well taking this example, what's the lack of transparency here? All they've done is given you (not anyone else) access to files you've already uploaded under a different heading. That's it, and they were calling it "batshit fucking insane".

It breaks unsophisticated users' conceptual model of how these things work. Admittedly, that's a low bar and a difficult problem.

When I looked at the Google+ account I didn't want or ask for, the default picture was from an Orkut account I signed up for on a lark before Google bought them.

I don't think some people in this thread understand that having something stored on the Internet, and having it be public, and having it to be tied to other public identities, and those identities being tied to your meatspace identity are four different questions.