How Google Photos Uses Public URLs to Keep Your Pictures Private

Anyone can see your photo if they have the right URL, but it's still safe

If you look at your private pictures in Google's new Photos service and right-click on one of them, you'll get a plain old URL. If you send that URL to someone else, they'll be able to see the picture too. Anyone can—that URL is totally public. But even if that seems wildly insecure, it's actually totally safe.

This seemingly weird and insecure part of Google Photos service was dug up by a Redditor who immediately experimented with a ton of ways to look at the link: Incognito tabs, VPNs, separate devices. Even when the computer couldn't possible know who was looking at the photo, it was still public. That sounds like cause for alarm, but The Verge talked to some engineers from Google's Photos team who explained exactly how the process works, and why it's safer than it looks.

For one thing, your private photos aren't always accessible by URL. Instead, when you right-click one, the Photos app whips up a public URL right then and there. More importantly, the URLs are long and random. It's easy to think "Oh no. Public! Anyone can get it!" but these URLs can be upwards of 40 characters long. That means a mind-blowingly large number of combinations. Billions upon trillions upon quadrillions times millions. That publicly accessible URL is way more secure than the average secret password.

The benefits of sharing by public URL are also pretty handy. As Google engineer Vincent Mo told The Verge:

The value of URLs is that they're universal. You can put it in a text message, you can put it in an email, you can put it on a webpage.

Ultimately, Google Photo's public URLs are just a versatile share function, albeit one that looks a little scary the first time you stumble across it. Just make sure you don't share that public URL somewhere you don't want it to be. If you do that, then it's just as easily accessible as anything else.

Source: The Verge

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
More From Security