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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

#201

Post by Barbing »

simonw wrote: post #103
smileybarry wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iOS does this by default too, but it tells you about it and gives you the option to not strip the location from EXIF: the bottom of the photo picker has the text "Location not included", and the context menu opened by the "..." button on the left has a "Location" toggle. Just tested this myself on iOS 26.4.1.

Thanks, just found that option hidden in the "..." and then "Options" menu: https://gist.github.com/simonw/6d530cdca574ac56450dfa805f25e...

Does the location messaging also feel more prominent to you from the Photos share sheet compared to the native image file picker? For example, that you would see when uploading to the ImgUr site.

Mainly top versus bottom placement, I think, but also font size.

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#202

Post by ndegruchy »

Barbing wrote: post #196
ndegruchy wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. You can turn it off for Camera if you don't want the geotag to be included in the photo when taken. You can also, as part of the share media picker, opt to include or exclude location data on the photo.

You can also for example just by voice ask the phone to turn off location services, then take your photos. As one can imagine, even when turning location services back on, the photo will never contain location data.

Yeah, toggling in any manner you see fit (a Shortcut would be useful in this case) the location services in its totality or in the context of the Camera app would accomplish the same result.

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#203

Post by rickdeckard »

I don't know, a quick check in Android documentation seems to describe this quite well [0]:

If your app targets Android 10 (API level 29) or higher and needs to retrieve unredacted EXIF metadata from photos, you need to declare the ACCESS_MEDIA_LOCATION permission in your app's manifest, then request this permission at runtime.

Caution: Because you request the ACCESS_MEDIA_LOCATION permission at runtime, there is no guarantee that your app has access to unredacted EXIF metadata from photos. Your app requires explicit user consent to gain access to this information.

I made another quick check on my device, Chrome doesn't have the ACCESS_MEDIA_LOCATION permission and doesn't seem to request it at runtime, so the location info is stripped from the EXIF data (by the OS!) when a file is selected.

Chromium also seems have no feature to ask the user whether he agrees to share the stored location when uploading images, so there is probably no capability to request the permission at runtime.

Not satisfying, I know, but despite some judgements in the tickets the implementation seems to work as designed.

Instead, it could be considered a feature-request for Chrome to ask the user about this on upload, or couple the location-permission of a website to the permission to share EXIF-location data when uploading files (Although I think the logic on that is not really tight, the user giving permission to share his location now doesn't necessarily mean that he agrees to share all his locations from the past from EXIF-data)

[0] https://developer.android.com/training/data-storage/shared/m...

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#204

Post by bornfreddy »

amazingamazing wrote: post #96
lukan wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also don't trust my government. So should I just degovernment completely? Sounds just as practical or realistic for most people.

You’re saying moving on from Google is similar to switching government?

Have you tried moving on from Google, and preferably not to Apple?

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#205

Post by ryandrake »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #89

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…

Depending on how populated your current location is, even a fuzzed location can reveal personal information. In a city, 10km is fine, nobody is identified. But if your home is the only one for 10km in any direction, and your fuzzing threshold is 10km, you've identified down to a single home.

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#206

Post by edent »

Zak wrote: post #99

I don't like this. The Right Thing is for camera apps to not add location metadata by default. If you go in and turn location on (which should have a warning on it), then you're the sort of person who changes defaults, a more sophisticated user than the majority of the population who is able to take responsibility for the consequences. Yes, I can imagine a scenario where someone ends up with this setting turned on th…

The default camera app has this off by default. Most of the ones I've tried do.

But do you remember every options you've randomly toggled over the years? It's pretty easy to see how someone would flip on geotagging, forget about it, then be shocked a few months later when they discover all their photos are leaking their location.

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#207

Post by ryandrake »

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'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.

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#208

Post by rickdeckard »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #142
freehorse wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> actually using the geolocation is an extremely niche usecase for images uploaded from mobile browsers Is it only for mobile browsers? The article makes it sound [0] as if it is a general thing, even when sharing through bluetooth, and that only copying the image via usb connection allows you to keep geolocation in exif. Not sure what happens when you upload to native apps, eg to some cloud storage app (photo specif…

I'm guessing they changed the default behavior from "include metadata" to "strip metadata" so now any app that wants metadata has to request it explicitly, and any older apps which don't know how to make such a request are simply unable to get location data? Seems like this is possibly related to the ACCESS_MEDIA_LOCATION permission[1], and Google's recent efforts to force applications to migrate to the scoped storag…

Yes, it's about that permission. It's not even that recent, it has been implemented since Android 10. I think it's summarized quite well here [0]:

If your app targets Android 10 (API level 29) or higher and needs to retrieve unredacted EXIF metadata from photos, you need to declare the ACCESS_MEDIA_LOCATION permission in your app's manifest, then request this permission at runtime.

So if the app-developer didn't take explicit effort to request this data (and the user-permission for it), his app will not receive it.

[0] https://developer.android.com/training/data-storage/shared/m...

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#209

Post by kristopolous »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #199
kristopolous wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These "all users are imbeciles that need our protection" design pattern needs to die a swift death.

Yes and no one who knows how to change an engine should drive a car. This is why geeks make horrible product people and after 30 years geeks are still waiting for “The Year of Linux on the Desktop”.

What you're advocating for is more like the Bluetooth hijacking when you get in a car of transferring your call from you ear piece to your sound system as if you want to blast your phone call to everyone in the parking lot.

Turn on car doesn't mean hijack Bluetooth connection.

Let me phrase this another way: "Computer, I told you to transfer file, not strip meta data".

About Linux: it won the Unix war, the cloud computing war, the embedded war, and is the most installed OS on the planet.

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#210

Post by bornfreddy »

nslsm wrote: post #136
sib wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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)

So in webmail, when you upload an image / file to attach it to an email, you expect it to be renamed? I don't.
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