With little or no fanfare (as usual), a recent change to Facebook’s iPhone and Android mobile apps will forever change the way people share photos and the way Facebook finds out where you are and what you are doing.

Here’s a screen grab from my Android phone, just a few minutes ago.

With an innocent-looking “Start Now” button and the very misleading^[1] insinuation that your friends are doing this, Facebook is trying to corral you into sharing every photo you take with your mobile device onto its cloud-based, minable storage. Just two taps, and the last 20 photos you have taken with your phone or tablet, and every image thereafter, will be automatically uploaded to Facebook’s cloud storage. Including photos that you never, ever ever ever ever ever want anyone to see. What kinds of photos those might be I will leave up to your individual imaginations.

Be aware of these things:

1. Your photos will only be visible to others if you explicitly share them
2. Whether shared or not, Facebook will be able to mine your geolocation data (if you have not purposely disabled that feature), meaning they will have a good idea of where you are at any given time, what stores you are close to, and what ads they wish you to see.
3. Given the ability of Google to identify photos (think of Google’s image search or Google Goggles), along with facial-recognition software, Facebook would very feasibly have the ability to automatically identify and tag your friends in photos that get sent to its database. You may have to authorize those tags to be visible, but doing that for you without your permission seems to me a gross violation of privacy.

You can read more about this over at TechCrunch. I’m not going to insist you “like and share” this, because I think that’s obnoxious – but I felt that folks should know about this new “feature.”

The Old Wolf has spoken.

[1] Yes, these three friends do share photos on Facebook. They are probably not, however, using this “insta-share” feature.