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Comment by ryandrake

16 hours ago

I'm gonna die on this hill, but silently attaching very sensitive PII (including exact lat/lon) to photos has always been a terrible anti-feature. One of those "WTF were they actually thinking?" terrible anti-features. Imagine if you created a word document and Microsoft silently attached your home address to them as metadata. Awful and totally unexpected to the vast majority of users.

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ryandrake

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nullfield  16 hours ago

As someone else mentioned it IS entirely problematic how advertisers/others abuse people, and I get WHY location gets stripped. I still think it's abusive to take away the user's choice.

(and why do they have to strip almost ALL EXIF data, instead of just location? [yes, yes, fingerprinting, but there are LOTS of iPhone {NUMBER} whatever out there])

It really just needs to be clearly communicated, opt-in at attach time. Probably with a severely hidden, developer-screen level, or BIG WARNING in security settings to totally disable stripping.

I assume most people won't want it, _usually_, so when adding photos just have it be a double-opt in - you have to both hit an extra button during attachment, then select "include location" or "include location and metadata", then a modal warning/confirmation.

Something like: "Confirm including photo location? This will permit the recipient to see where the pictures were taken. <yes/no>"

  • inhumantsar  15 hours ago

    I agree with you that, when sharing, location should be stripped by default with an option to include it.

    After seeing this post I checked my recent photos. I'm using a Pixel 6 Pro with the most recent android release and the stock camera app. None of my recent photos have location in the EXIF, even locally, and there's no option to turn it on.

    It's particularly galling that the Camera app still wants location permissions and if you view a photo in the Google Photos app, the location is still there. Google can have those exact locations, but no one, not even the user, can.

    It's abusive as hell.