I lost my wallet and passport on Potrero and Ceasar Chavez whilst riding my bike to work in SF a few months back. I was contacted through linkedin connections and got everything back.

Lead to wallet being returned by a person who works at the biopark in Potrero, and my passport by a person who worked in stem-cell research at Byers Hall of UCSF.

Both people were awesome female scientists/researchers who returned my stuff and gave me an ~hour long tour of their work, facilities and research.

Fucking AWESOME.

With the ability to broadcast internationally immediately, and the 4.3 degrees of separation that they claim people now have in the modern world, its little wonder logically (although still pretty amazing that we've come this far) that the owner of the camera can be found. If 200 people see this post even, and there's only 4.3 degrees of separation between people, probably less with geographic and language concentration, then I'd almost be shocked if you couldn't find the owner.

Still, very very cool.

I don't believe that's the case here. This specific instance speaks nothing of how "connected" everyone is, it shows that if you are notable (enough to warrant a mention somewhere online -- as this guy was and that's how he was found) then you can be located easily.

If this guy had been anonymous and unknown I doubt we'd have seen the same result. This also has nothing to do with google+ beyond it being the platform for discussion used, the post could easily replace "google+" with any online discussion platform, hackernews for example.

Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous to see how often this proves to be true on the various social networks (especially reddit).

What about privacy? Posting someone's pictures was obviously a benelovent act, but imagine the consequences if the guy was cheating on his wife and the pictures were with his girlfriend. I let you imagine as many scenarios as you want. Just be considerate of other people's private data.

That's just the cost of cheating on your wife.

I guess you could crop the picture to keep the face and remove context (which obviously removes information as well...)

I wish the lazyweb worked that well for me!