Hello, welcome to my Worst Nightmare: Technology Edition. Smartphones connect us all so well digitally and that can seem like a huge benefit. On the other hand, there’s such a thing as too much connection, so please let this video from TikToker @karatonin, or Kara Tonin, be a reminder to check your privacy settings and maybe even get an entirely separate phone for sexting.
Tonin was using her phone for multiple purposes and unfortunately, those purposes crossed streams in a disastrous way.
“This is a PSA for anybody who uses Google photos or any photo app that uses facial recognition,” Tonin begins.
“So Google Photos has this incredible thing where it recognizes people’s faces and if you type in their name it will pull up every picture and video with their face in it.”
“And then you can make an album of that person and share it with your friends and family.”
“Isn’t technology incredible? A little too f-cking incredible if you ask me.”
“So Google made a joyful little album of my son and then shared it with my mom, so any time I upload a photo of him it’ll share it with my mother.”
“So a little while back I decided I wanted to spice things up a little bit in my relationship.”
“And I made a rated R video where I was doing unspeakable, un-Godly things, and Google photos picked up a very small picture of my son in the background on my fridge.”
“And said ‘hey that’s a picture of Josh, let’s send the video to Kara’s mom.’
“I’m so sorry mom.”
The video has been viewed almost three million times, so Tonin’s message is getting out there. It’s actually incredibly generous of her to share what might be the most humiliating incident of her life to try and protect us all from Google’s privacy invasion.
Well, she probably gave them permission at some point, but that’s why we need to remember to really understand how something works before using it.
Not that I blame her. Who could have anticipated this? And yet now it’s all I’ll ever think about every time I take a picture.