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Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

shkspr.mobi

131–140 of 330 posts

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#131
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those of us stuck on normal android, is there a way to achieve that? I know it used to work with some firewall apps but nowdays they all require root access.

Go to settings > App > $SCUMMY_APP > Mobile Data & WiFi. Uncheck all.

Not a thing on stock android

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#132
Now, I don't fully understand why people want their images to be tracked - but to each their own. I think this just shows that Google is very selfish, from A to Z. People should not empower this evil empire. Recently Google also stated that "cookies can not be stolen":

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Google-Chrome-makes-cookie-thef...

However had to me this reads as "we control the now private web". This also aligns, in my opinion, with age verification (systemd already pushes for it). So we move into a not so open world wide web. Are you identified? If yes, you can get information; if no you can not. Personally I am in the underground anyway, as long-term linux users so I don't really care that much (though I also use Win10 on a computer on my left side, for various reasons). But I am really annoyed at Google. Every day Google adds to problems and drama. It is not good that this monopoly can control so much in the whole ecosystem, even if I don't understand why people want to share photos and geolocation and what underwear they were wearing at that moment in time ...

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#133
post #4

Most likely: actually using the geolocation is an extremely niche usecase for images uploaded from mobile browsers. I’d wager 99.9% of the users didn’t realize that they are effectively sending their live GPS coords to a random website when taking a photo. But yes, a prop to the input tag ’includeLocation’ which would then give the user some popup confirmation prompt would have been nice

On that point I would agree - I never used that. But Google also lied why it wanted to destroy ublock origin. It was clear to everyone that they did it because people can break away from ads infiltrating their computers. I can't use the modern www anymore without general content blocker; ublock lite is good but nowhere as useful as ublock origin was. I notice this when I compare e. g. firefox with default chrome. So many websites have a totally broken UI. With ublock origin not only can I get rid of popups or ads but also horrible UI choices. I use that on so many websites to simplify them.

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#134

I wish they'd just switch to fuzzing the location instead of stripping it entirely. Instead of specifying 6 digits of lat/lon, publish 1 digit to identify what rough area you're in (to about 10km). I've done a lot of neat projects with geolocation over the years. Including a personal travel diary, a bunch of visualizations of tweets and Flickr photos, etc etc. I am sad that's become nearly impossible but I do respect…

Totally disagree, as I think that would be the worst of all possible worlds - too fuzzy to be useful for many of the niche use cases where it's needed, and still a privacy violation for the majority of users who don't know their photos reveal their location.

The other suggestion about requiring something like a useLocation or includeExif attribute on the file picker, and then requiring confirmation from the user, seems like a much better solution to me.

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#135
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first eye-opening moment working within the government was with team of herpetologists at the state conservation agency. They had a pretty slick public education campaign around protecting Gopher Tortoise habitats and a grand call-to-action "let the agency know where and when they see their nests". The whole thing fell apart because they were getting tons of earnestly-submitted junk data from earnestly-engaged cit…

> earnestly-submitted junk data from earnestly-engaged citizens. What made the data junk? Were the provided coordinates not precise enough, incorrect, something else?

Well that's just it - in most of the submissions the coordinates weren't supplied at all, and when any location information was given it would come down to just a city name or a park name. They're trying to pipe these results into ArcGIS to inform park rangers where to reroute trails, public works departments where to survey before digging, and real estate developers which lots need proper relocation assistance before building on. They were depending on the average citizen to know how to fill out a technical field in this form and to do so accurately, and without and form validation. The whole project needed re-thinking.

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#136
post #87
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously an image picker shouldn't leak filenames... The filename is a property of the directory entry storing the file storing the image. The image picker only grants access to the image, not to directories, directory entries or files. If you want filenames, you need to request access to a directory, not to an image

"Obviously" There are plenty of use cases where the filename is relevant (and many, many people intentionally use the image name for sorting / cataloging).

There are many, many more cases where the user doesn’t expect the name to become public when he sends a photo. If I send you a photo of a friend that doesn’t mean I want you to know his name (which is the name I gave the file when I saved it)

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#137
post #17

Yes, I get it. It is inconvenient for legitimate uses. The problem is that our devices leak too much confidential data. Privacy was mentioned outright in the article. Safety/security was alluded to with an example, which is something that goes far beyond a company's image or even liability. Unfortunately, there is no good way to solve the problem while maintaining convenience. As the author noted, prompts while uploa…

Agreed. The default for a web browser should be maximum privacy/minimum sharing/minimum trust. If they want to access photos with geolocation they can make an app instead of a website, then the app can explictly ask for this permission. Too much trouble? Well then I guess it won't get done. Not the end of the world.

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#138
In a similar move (silently changing a feature crucial to some users), in Android 11 Google suddenly removed the possibility to use "special" characters

  ":?|\*
in filenames[0], presumably because they're not allowed on Windows/NTFS and Windows users might end up struggling to transfer them to their Windows computer. I don't care about NTFS at all, though. I just want to be able to sync all my files with my Linux machines and now I'm no longer able to. Makes me want to scream.

[0]: https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/952

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first eye-opening moment working within the government was with team of herpetologists at the state conservation agency. They had a pretty slick public education campaign around protecting Gopher Tortoise habitats and a grand call-to-action "let the agency know where and when they see their nests". The whole thing fell apart because they were getting tons of earnestly-submitted junk data from earnestly-engaged cit…

A colleague of mine tried doing this after a large sturgeon die off in the San Francisco Bay a few years ago. Citizens were asked to upload photos of dead sturgeon washed up on beaches. They actually got pretty good data (sturgeon are very easily identifiable) and lots of participation, but the location data ending up being largely useless because it was fuzzed (I think by iOS?) to a large enough degree to no longer…

Oh that's fascinating. I hadn't considered OS-level fuzzing as a hurdle until now. I'm an pixel guy and typically I get decently-accurate location heatmaps in the Photos app when I search by location; I wonder how we would have handled this. HABs are so difficult, they break my heart.

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#140

It's a sad story and a fun-looking project but I think Google 100% did the right thing here. Most people have no idea how much information is included in photo metadata, and stripping it as much as possible lines up to how people expect the world to work.

Seems like such a shitty thing to victimize the potential victim. But… if you didn’t know that images you took had metadata… maybe you shouldn’t be allowed to use a computer. I mean. I’m going on decades of knowing this. Feel like there is a mid 90s X-Files episode that even like breaks this down. If not NCIS or some shit.

You're right - this is a shitty view on this. It's incredibly opaque that images secretly contain the GPS coordinates of where they were taken. There's no way that's obvious or intuitive.

I think the 'ideal' thing to do would be an opt-in toggle for sharing "location and other extended info" for photos when selecting them, but I'm sure you can understand why a dev team took a shortcut to solve the immediate pain for most users most of the time.

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