This is the behavior I expect. I don't think I'm alone in this.
But it would be a huge, huge problem if someone could tag me in a photo and share it to some circles that didn't include me. Fake-tagging people or tagging people in embarrassing photos is a major problem on FB, and the privacy issue here goes two ways: the person you tagged also has their own privacy concerns. What if you tagged an embarrassing photo of me, shared it with a circle of hundreds of co-workers (that you excluded me from), and then not only do I not know the picture is out there, but co-workers can see it by visiting my profile and looking at pictures tagged of me? That would be orders of magnitude worse than the status quo.
I'm trying to think of how you design a system that respects both my concerns and those of the OP, and I can't come up with anything that would be intuitive. (Suppose that you could tag an album full of people and keep it private to yourself, but sharing it with a family circle caused it to also be shared with everyone you tagged? That really would break user expectations). I think the current implementation might be the best one, perhaps with more of a warning in the UI that tagging shares with the person tagged. In essence this is not a privacy complaint, it's a feature request: people want to use tags for a different purpose (organizing private albums) than they are designed for.
Let's break this down and relate it to physical (they're both real) photos:
What if you tagged an embarrassing photo of me
Considering only viewing the page for the photo at this point: With physical photos it's possible to write someone's name on them, and online it's always possible to add a description identifying who is in a photo, so being able to tag anyone doesn't increase the information storage of the system.
shared it with a circle of hundreds of co-workers (that you excluded me from)
People can show physical photos of you to other people without you knowing. They can send or grant access to digital photos without you knowing. Being able to grant access to photos of you on a social network is just an extension of this. Granting access so that people can see the photos when viewing an album or see an album in an album list is (or could be) separate from where or how that permission to view the photo is made known.
and then not only do I not know the picture is out there We don't know that about physical photos, or photos that are sent in emails.
but co-workers can see it by visiting my profile and looking at pictures tagged of me?
Now this would be problem. There shouldn't be anything viewable on your profile by other people that you can't see yourself. Photo's should only be able to be shared and sent in private by explicitly sending a message to a group of people.
I don't think that scenario is possible with G+ at the moment. Tagging someone in a photo automatically gives that person access to the photo.
What G+ currently lacks is a way to tag someone without giving that person access to the photo. That's not perfect but it's better than the alternative which you described. Hopefully they'll find a way of making it possible to tag someone in private without putting it in front of people in ways that it's not possible in the physical world. You can't pin embarrassing photos on people without them noticing.
This happened to me 3 HOURS after joining facebook, and was not even ill-intentioned. (ah, young people!)
edit: I marked tagged photos as private for a year till that photo was untagged. The photo is still there. :(
I gave an actual occurrence for a hypothetical. The only offense I can see is that it was anecdotal evidence.
edit: thanks to those who upvoted me back to 1 :)
Making the entire album visible to Person A, I think, is not as reasonable.
I think it's reasonable to share a photo where Person A is tagged only if the photo has been shared. Tagging and sharing are separate actions as far as most people are concerned so there's not a good reason I can see for the UI performing both actions on a tag event.
Tagging is sharing. I see tagging as creating a link between the photo and my google+ profile. Maybe there should be a second option of labeling my name but not linking to my profile and thus keeping the label private, which is odd but seems more like what you want.
In the case of physical photos, no I dont think you need to give everyone a copy because that would take effort on your part. Sharing on google+ is costless.
Regarding sharing, why would you want to tag somebody with his/her public profile without even telling him/her that?
If I mark an album as private in Picasa Web, I wouldn't expect anything to be shared. Especially if I would have been doing this for years.
This violates the principle of least astonishment, at the very least.
That being said there probably just needs to be better messaging on this so that users understand what exactly it means to tag someone.
1) It would make sense if you see the world only as one big group (i.e. without any "circles"), like Facebook does. But having different levels an types of relationships is G+'s strong point. This totally contradicts this point.
2) In Picasa, the setting was "private" and it was private. Now, that suddenly changes and there is no way back. Many people have relied on the former policy and know have a big "surprise, you are screwed" flashing on their screen. Not good.
And there are more reasons, but these two are already more than sufficient.
While you might make an album based on events I tend to make albums based on dates. During periods where I don't take a lot of pictures I might have all of the pictures in an album for a specific month. If I then tag a friend in a picture from a baseball game we went to he now has access to all of the pictures in that album which might include pictures from a private family outing or event. Could my organizational habits be changed? Sure, but I shouldn't have to.
The much bigger problem I have with this is that the people tagged in your albums not only get the ability to see the entire album, but to re-share the album. I am extremely meticulous in whom I share anything with. I disable re-sharing on 99% of my posts that are to family and friends. I disable re-sharing on ALL of my shared photos. By using the tagging feature my desire to limit sharing is completely ignored. So while I might want to tag someone in a picture for my own benefit, especially if it was at an event where maybe I didn't know everyone very well, I won't use it if the albums are shared without my consent.
edit: I just noticed that referencing someone with the +name or +email address notation in photo comments has the same effect of sharing the photo + album + re-share
http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=129927...
How many people realize that Facebook has been doing this for a long long time?
I don't agree with letting them see the whole album by default. Albums aren't necessarily associated with an event. If you have an album called "Family", you might want to let your buddy see the pictures of the family barbecue he attended, without necessarily sharing the picture of your wife breastfeeding.
I have many albums broken out by date. The fact that you were playing basketball with me at 10am doesn't mean you were at my sister's house that evening.
Google is making social take a lot more energy than I care to give it. Circles seemed OK. But now having to break up my albums and tagging into visibility units is absurd. It's easier to just quit.
G+ is making me really appreciate Facebook -- which I NEVER thought I'd say.
Folks really need to stop themselves from making user actions have much longer reach than what the user actually did. It would probably be fine to have a "share button" appear next to the tag of the person's name. That shows that the picture is still private, but you might now want to share it with that specific person.
Let's go a bit further down this hyper-connected, automatic world. Let's say Google Plus implements facial recognition. Seems like a good idea, saves you some time. So, I upload a ton of photos and they get automatically tagged. It would be very hard to consider anything private under those circumstances. Worse, I am truly using "the cloud". Maybe some of those photos need to be deleted or edited.
At the end of it all, I wrote a note on a picture. Having additional things happen without permission is just a bad UI choice and leads to problems and apologies. And since someone decided the whole album is now shared, it could lead to some physical danger.
If I don't know them I'm not going to tag them because I have no idea who they are, but I may want to share the event with people that I do know. Now with auto tagging these people I don't know are tagged in my photos and I have to share not only my photo of them with them, but the entire album? That seems to be really over reaching. Auto tagging and automatic sharing seems like the worst possible option to me.