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Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

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Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#161

Post by dylan604 »

sixothree wrote: post #91
eru wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google prompts you in Google Maps if you want to upload your picture to Maps. I sometimes do that for random pictures, even like selfies, which I don't mind popping up there.

I had a popup on my iPhone one day "You were in City Park last weekend, would you like to share those photos?". I stopped allowing google access to my photos after that. A little late though, they had apparently scraped all of my data already.

I don't even have G-apps on my phone. They work fine in a browser, until they don't. I was trying to use streetview yesterday and it would not open in the browser and kept trying to redirect me to the app store. So now they are deliberately borking their webapps to punish those not using native apps.

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#162

Post by mapmeld »

Shalomboy wrote: post #135
latexr wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 befor…

Sounds like a combination of 'can it be geocoded?' and 'is their location precise enough?' There is some progress on resolving human-written locations in cities ( https://www.danvk.org/2026/03/08/oldnyc-updates.html ) but I imagine once you lose reference points, '100 feet into Golden Gate Park...' would be interpretable but not possible to fix to one point.

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#163

Post by Barbing »

throw_await wrote: post #129
lukan wrote: 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.

Why does Apple not give that Wi-Fi option there? I mean, is there a reason we’d be sympathetic to?

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#164

Post by xigoi »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #125

This is a common approach to "privacy" taken by orgs like Google. You don't get to access or export your own data in order to protect your privacy, but Google still gets 100% access to it. Some messaging apps do the same and won't let you take a screenshot of your own conversations. Like, someone sent me an address, but I can't take a screenshot to "protect my privacy".

Which messaging apps are those? I have only seen such behavior for one-time photos, where it makes sense (although one-time photos are security theater because nothing prevents you from taking a photo of the screen with another device).

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#165

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

Shalomboy wrote: post #79
ieie3366 wrote: 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

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…

Really? You don’t understand why people wouldn’t want to share their location with the government?

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#166

Post by xigoi »

lukan wrote: post #78
sathackr wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GrapheneOS still does this -- allows controlling internet access on a per-app basis.

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.

Not the same thing, but you can install an app like Blokada Libre to block ads and trackers in all apps.

https://blokada.org/

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#167

Post by dylan604 »

kristopolous wrote: post #126
ieie3366 wrote: 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

I want the location on every time, without exception. The current behavior is exactly what I wanted. These "all users are imbeciles that need our protection" design pattern needs to die a swift death. It's maddening, We're constantly taking kitchen knives and replacing them with the colorful plastic toddler version and still have the same cutting tasks.

I was a fan of the idea that the OS would strip location data on any upload via web/app, but would preserve the data when doing specific types of transfers deemed not via third party like direct transfer to computer or AirDrop

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#168

Post by drnick1 »

> If anyone has a working way to let Android web-browsers access the full geolocation EXIF metadata of photos uploaded on the web, please drop a comment in the box.

No. I don't want people like you unknowingly spying on me when I upload a picture. GrapheneOS patched that insane behavior long ago, but not including leaky metadata should be the default, sane behavior.

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#169

Post by xp84 »

ThePowerOfFuet wrote: post #141
codethief wrote: post #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 mac…

Putting a star into a filename is a pain in the ass, no matter the OS.

Escaping and quoting isn’t really that hard

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#170

Post by Barbing »

jeroenhd wrote: post #66
sixhobbits wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 confusi…

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.

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