Comment by sixhobbits
1 day ago
yeah it does sound kind of dodge that there's no option even for advanced users to bypass this, I would guess mainly a moat to protect Google Photos. I wonder if online photo competitors are finding a workaround or not as searching your photos by location seems like a big feature there
I don't know when Google's EXIF protections are supposed to kick in, but so far my photos auto-synced to Nextcloud still contain location information as expected.
I don't think this has anything to do with Google Photos. People fall victim to doxxing or stalking or even location history tracking by third party apps all the time because they don't realize their pictures contain location information. It's extra confusion to laypeople now that many apps (such as Discord) will strip EXIF data but others (websites, some chat apps) don't.
Important point:
> It's extra confusion to laypeople now that many apps (such as Discord) will strip EXIF data but others (websites, some chat apps) don't.
You've given me a lot of sympathy for the young'uns whose first experiences on the web might have been with EXIF-safe apps. Then one day they use a web browser to send a photo, and there's an entirely new behavior they've never learned.
> Then one day they use a web browser to send a photo, and there's an entirely new behavior they've never learned.
The article is actually about Google's web browser stripping the EXIF location-data when uploading a photo to a webpage, and the author complains about that behavior.
This is not an implementation of the browser itself. Android Chrome is behaving in that way because the app didn't request the required permission for that data from the OS (which would ask the user), so the files it receives to upload already has the data removed
2 replies →
This is honestly a horrible argument. Any app on Android can still get EXIF data
You're replying to someone who is talking about a native app, but the overall issue here is about web apps. Chrome and Firefox don't request the appropriate permission (which, as things stand right now, is probably the safer choice), and there's no way for a website to signal to the browser that it wants that permission, so that the browser could prompt the user only for websites that ask for it, and persist the allow/deny response, similarly to how general location permission works via the JS location APIs.