Potential Privacy Issue with Lightroom CC/6 and People Keywords

Lightroom CC/6 has been
out for a few days, and in working with Lightroom's new Face Tagging
feature, I've run across something that could be a privacy issue for some
folks.

Keywords in Lightroom have an “Include on Export” option; if it's
disabled, the keyword is not (supposed to be) included in exported copies
of photos. This is useful for workflow-related keywords that you use merely
to help manage your catalog, or for keywords you'd rather not expose to the
public.

The problem I've discovered in Lightroom CC/6 is that the “Include on Export”
option is ignored if it's a “Person” keyword (one used with the new Face Tagging feature).

For example, imagine tagging photos from an office party and giving your boss
the snarky name “My Jerk of a Boss”. Of course, you'd not want to expose that
in copies you uploaded or shared with others, so you'd think you were safe
by disabling “Include on Export” like this:

Lightroom's Publish/Export dialog includes a standard section on what metadata to include in
the exported copies:

The “Remove Person Info” option is new in Lightroom CC/6, and it seems
that it (and it alone) controls whether “Person” keywords are
included in export. If this remove option is not
turned on, all Person keywords are exported even if their “Include on Export”
option has been explicitly disabled.

In the “My Jerk of a
Boss” example, you might have wanted
other People keywords to be included, so not turned on the “Remove Person Info”
option, thinking that the lack of “Include on
Export” would keep “My Jerk of a Boss” out of the images you share. I
assume that's how it's supposed to work, but it doesn't.

I don't suppose that this bug (if that's what it is) will actually affect very many people,
but if it does, it could be a doozy.

I've reported it to Adobe. I'll update this post with new info as it becomes available.

In related news, I've figured out how to bring the Face-Tagging feature
to my Facebook
plugin. For example, after having used Lightroom's Face Tagging feature to identify faces of
friends in the photos from the 100km bike ride I
recently wrote about, all the tagging in

the exported copies at Facebook was automatic via the beta version of
my plugin. It was nice not to have to walk through every copy at Facebook
and tag people.

So that's something to look forward to. It was while working on this that I discovered the potential privacy issue.