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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

#231

Post by smileybarry »

akamaka wrote: post #106
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.

I just tested this and the default setting is to include location, but once turned off it stays off (unlike the iPhone share sheet where you need to turn it off each time).

Odd, it was off for me the first time I opened that website, maybe it's persisted from some other context.

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#232

Post by driverdan »

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…

What types of files are you syncing that have those characters in their names?

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#233

Post by Shalomboy »

smelendez wrote: post #197
Shalomboy wrote: post #79

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…

I wonder if there would be any way to fix this with the right messaging. With infinite funding and the right agency cooperation, I bet you could include this in a state parks app that you could also use for other useful purposes, like pulling up trail maps, paying for parking and camping, fishing licensing, signing up for volunteer events, receiving notifications with news around particular parks you frequent, etc. B…

> I bet you could include this in a state parks app that you could also use for other useful purposes, like pulling up trail maps, paying for parking and camping, fishing licensing, signing up for volunteer events, receiving notifications with news around particular parks you frequent, etc.

I wanted us to do this so badly; inter-agency coordination was the biggest issue with I had with large-scale projects. The funny part about your comment is that each feature you listed was a function that a different agency or contractor handled. I won't name names, but the agency I worked for had better-than-expected public outreach and engagement and were organizationally flexible enough to get low-footprint, high-impact conservation PR like this out the door and in front of people in time to make a difference. But in state government, the idea of several agencies pooling resources for a permanent app store project is totally pie-in-the-sky thinking largely because nobody has the bandwidth to contribute. I'm trying to imagine submitting a PR to 'The State Parks App' org board to get this form shipped and in every instance, I'm getting yelled at.

> If people are wary of sharing their location with the conservation agency, you might have better luck if the website was run by a nongovernmental conservation group?

Our NGO partners were incredible for this sort of thing. People legitimately do not think twice about pinging a facebook group run by, say, the local aquarium and including their location, a description of the site, and photos of what they found. Social media removes a lot of metadata from uploads - they probably keep it someplace and I just can't get at it without a brokerage, idk - but it still gets better results than we did. One fix for the tortoise problem was to supply personal trail maps and golf pencils at trail heads. Hikers were encouraged to take them, mark on the map where they saw burrows along the trail, and put them in a box at the end of the trail/parking lot/ranger station. Park rangers would scan in the maps and upload the scans to our internal site and we would work it out from there.

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#234

Post by Shalomboy »

mapmeld wrote: post #162
Shalomboy wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're absolutely right. Highways are a little better since they have mile markers, but once you get into a nature preserve you're dealing with a whole bunch of "If you pass the pond with the cattails on your left, you've gone too far." Fishermen, it turned out, LOVED sending coordinates for stuff they saw so long as their fishing spot wasn't nearby.

Cool article btw!

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#235

Post by rickdeckard »

Barbing wrote: post #170
jeroenhd wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#236

Post by kristopolous »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #226
kristopolous wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comp…

And absolutely no one knows they are using Linux. Google had to hide all of the Unix underpinnings and do things like this to make it usable. As far as the BT car issue. I don’t have that issue. I turned off wireless CarPlay, don’t use BT and I connect my phone to my car using a regular old USB C cable to avoid that issue - and it’s more reliable

See you've done all this workaround, fighting with what some designer did because they assumed all the users are imbeciles.

The problem shouldn't exist. The object should do what we instruct, and not have its own opinions of us and do stuff on our behalf presuming incompetency

Let's take another example, the 4chan-ification of the web making everything ephemeral. All the feed based sites basically hide what you just saw forever. They've fundamentally broken the web and made all content disposable.

It's no longer an addressable public record. It breaks the fundamental storage and organization principles of why computers exist and the fundamental purposes of why they're networked together, as a shared communal record.

Seeing this working well goes back to original online spaces like this in the 1970s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Memory

Or my favorite quote about this

> It was like an interactive bulletin board. This wasn’t a machine behind a locked door calling shots, quantifying your inadequacies… No! You could touch it. It was a radical reversal. We all knew who the computer was. But, this time, it had no idea who we were.” “Sounds like chaos!” Thomas responds.

> “No! It was anything but!” Orion snaps back protectively, “I could sit at the keyboard and it would say”hello human”. A black woman could sit down and it would say “hello human”. Henry Kissinger could. It would say “hello human” and not for any redemption on his part.

> It’s because the computer was taught how to help but nobody had fed it Instruction on how to hate. It was then I first saw the computer as a place. A place of hope: an apotheosis of everything I fight for and every thing I want the world to be.”

Instead we've broken this and made things aggressively caustic to the human spirit and it shows. Social media is a poison because it's designed poisonously.

This is a deep and systemic problem. You didn't have to see it

It's there but you don't have to see it

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#237

Post by Shalomboy »

JTbane wrote: post #228
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If a state environmental agency asks you for your location on photos that you volunteered to upload and you freak out, you might be mentally ill.

I wouldn't take it that far. For most users we spoke to, its often a reflex to deny location privilege popups, and on mobile it wasn't easy enough to fix once denied. However for some of the less-engaged folks who might be out in the park casually and stumbled on something worth sharing, the idea that we need their exact location probably sounded overbearing. "I told them which park I was in, that should be enough!"

Yeah no kidding the vulnerable animal population is in the park, that's where all their threats are removed. But sometimes "the park" is 60,000 acres and it would be nice if you could help narrow it down.

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#238

Post by kelnos »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #165
Shalomboy wrote: post #79

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…

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

I get the reflex to deny permissions (and I also get the reflex to allow anything, in the interest of just getting the annoying pop-up to go away), but it's really tiresome that we have to expect people to avoid thinking even the least bit critically at every juncture.

If you're filling out a form with the express purpose of letting someone know specifically where something is... a request for location information is reasonable, duh. And I won't accept the "people are busy and don't have the time and energy to think this through" excuse. If you're taking the time to fill out this form, then yes, you have the time -- seconds, at most -- to think this through in this particular case.

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#239

Post by rickdeckard »

roywiggins wrote: post #123
SirMaster wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we should educate people about it. Don't you think that constantly coddling people about tech just breeds tech-illiterate people? Wouldn't it be better if people were more tech-literate? Coddling only works when those who are in charge of the tech play nice. But then breeds people who will more easily fall victim to the bad actors.

I said that people who already know don't think about it . That's not something you can solve by educating them more. When I'm sharing a photo, I am going to think about what I can see in the photo as a data risk, not the invisible stuff that I might intellectually have heard about. It's just not going to come to mind. People who know about phishing get got by phishing attacks, too. How well has however many years of…

Agree. That's also the dilemma with asking the user for his permission, it is very difficult to frame a concise question and get an educated decision there. So, better to only ask if the App explicitly requests that permission sounds reasonable.

The prior threat-model was, that e.g. a camera/gallery app which may/may not have a permission to a users current location, also has access to the history of a users' locations just by scanning the images when showing the camera roll.

It frankly makes sense to create a separate permission just for this location metadata AND strip this data when no permission was granted, I believe everything else would be MUCH harder to explain the user...

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#240

Post by inhumantsar »

nullfield wrote: post #222
ryandrake wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 ti…

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.

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