Full disclosure: I'm a Google employee, but not in the areas mentioned in the article. This is my personal opinion.
Regarding the Nest thing: I don't think those devices stop working completely if you don't enable location sharing for the "home and away" feature. It might be bad UI that made the user think that this is the case?
Regarding photo sharing: I think that permission is necessary to show a "photo picker" inside the app that allows the user to pick and choose which photos to upload. I'm not quite sure what the alternative would look like: "he can identify specific pictures in his library and grant access to just those" --> How exactly would that work without the app having access to the pictures? Also, does the author believe the app would then secretly analyze all pictures and send content back to the mothership without the user's consent? Again, this might be a communication/UX issue...
Bad UI is an intentional decision by the app developers to shepherd folks into thinking they have no choice.
As for how to make photo library access selective, iOS does this just fine. The app thinks it’s seeing everything, but it can only see what you selected. Plus Apple has made it easy to edit those choices. And if you do grant an app unlimited access, it checks in every once in a while to be sure you still want it (particularly if you don’t use the feature very often).
> How exactly would that work without the app having access to the pictures?
Android recently added an option that lets apps pop up a picker and only get access to the picked pictures. They probably just didn't realize that some users might want to only share some photos with Google Photos or didn't think the slice was big enough to justify implementing.
>How exactly would that work without the app having access to the pictures?
Extremely simple: the photo picker is part of the OS and not the app, so the app can open it and wait for return file handles without knowing a thing about what the file browser will display
Selective access to a set of user-specified photos is a native feature of iOS. Any time an app prompts you to choose some photos from your photo reel, you are first given the option to explicitly choose which photos the app even has access to.
On a desktop browser, if a web site wants me to upload photos, I click the "upload" button, and then the browser displays a file picker. The web site only ever sees the files I choose.
The web has this because it has to. Obviously you can't just give a web site permission to see your whole hard drive just to open one file.
But this kind of "privileged picker" approach does not seem to be the norm for mobile apps. I'm actually not even sure if iOS and Android even offer such a UI, or if apps simply have no choice but to request full access and implement their own picker.
If they do offer a picker, I would guess the reason the Google Photos app doesn't use it is not because Google's trying to invade your privacy, but rather because a product manager did not like the fact that they couldn't control the look and feel of the UI. It probably is significantly uglier and clunkier than what the Photos app itself can provide. And unfortunately, most users don't care about granting permissions. So the sleeker UX wins out. (I hate this.)
If the goal is to emulate human behavior, I'd say there is a case to be made to build for the same interface, and not rely on separate APIs that may or may not reflect the same information as a user sees.
We have pretty much infinite training data available on YouTube. We can scale by many orders of magnitude before we run out of data. Why do you think we hit a ceiling?
IIUC the EU basically had to force banks to implement this via a mandate. I don't see "business friendly" US lawmakers doing the same anytime soon. The joys of the Free market™!
I mean, yes, it was mandated, but I am decently confident a usable system would have emerged one way or the other. In Germany we had a standardized API for online banking (HBCI) just because banks agreed it would be reasonable to do that.
In Europe, you have a millennia-long culture of classism, feudalism, aristocracy, guilds, etc., that's still somewhat ingrained in modern society. People are more content with being born into a certain class, not expecting or striving for upward mobility. You'll see people picking a profession after school and sticking with it until retirement, and it's out of the norm to switch or try to start a business.
Whereas in the US, a few hundred years ago settlers came in and had to start from scratch. It doesn't matter what you were in your previous life, everyone had an equal start (more or less), and they had to build whole cities from scratch.
I think this partly also explains the differences in salary between the US and Europe. There is a deeply ingrained sense of "ordinary workers shouldn't make more than $X, that doesn't make sense" creating a kind of tacit collusion between employers, which does not exist in this form in the US.
