The Verge, on the introduction of Google Photos:
As Google looks to promote its big new product, that raises a serious question: do you trust Google with your photos? Do you trust anyone with them? Google isn’t alone in trying to solve the photo-sharing puzzle, and it’s likely to have plenty of competition in the years to come. Photos’ interface is impressive, but it’s nothing that couldn’t be copied by teams at Apple or Microsoft. The scope of the storage is impressive too, but well within reach for any company running its own server farms. But as the world’s largest tech companies look to take over your camera roll, the rarest commodity may be trust.
But Google’s attempts at reassuring people through new privacy controls mean very little, because
Google looks through every image you upload as part of its automatic scan, which is necessary to categorize the photos by content. There’s no way to opt out: it’s central to the way Photos approaches organization, and the service doesn’t make sense without it. At the same time, if you’re using Photos to keep track of legal documents or more sensitive pictures, it’s easy to see why that might make you nervous.
There’s something for Apple too in the article:
Unfortunately, Apple’s photo system is all built on top of iCloud, which has a long history of security failures and general service issues. The massive leak of celebrity photos in September was a particularly damaging reminder, and one Apple still hasn’t lived down.
When someone uses someone else’s password to access their private information and distribute them to the world, it’s not a leak. It’s theft.