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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

#241

Post by kelnos »

ieie3366 wrote: post #223
isodev wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> extremely niche usecase Phones are computers though, it’s not up to Google or Apple to decide what’s a good use case for my own pictures.

You are not the target audience :)

Then I'm not the target audience for any mobile OS, given the restrictions of Google's and Apple's platforms, not to mention the inadequacy (for me) of the features sets for any of the niche open source alternatives. While I expect I'm not in the majority, I'm certainly far from unique.

That's not a good position to be in; this duopoly we've allowed to prosper needs to go.

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#242

Post by kelnos »

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”.

That's an incredibly bad analogy.

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#243

Post by rickdeckard »

Barbing wrote: post #176
madeofpalk wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When you upload the photo, at risk of great confusion they could essentially watermark the photo or add a banner showing the location and perhaps some of the other key details, like camera model, right on the photo so it would at least get across to the user that there is an association between these two things that needs to be disabled. To dismiss the banner you'd have to click a dismiss button which would ask you t…

Sounds fun, but in this case it's actually the OS which is stripping the meta-data before fulfilling the file-access request to the app.

Now an app maybe just wants to set the image as wallpaper, send it to a printer or set as an avatar, so it requests to read it from storage. The OS injecting a watermark here or adding some UI would break decades of apps...

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#244

Post by kelnos »

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

> I don’t have that issue.

Ah yes, the good old, "I don't have that particular issue, so I can use my experience to dismiss your concern".

You do realize that sometimes bugs only affect a small percentage of users, right? And even if it affects, say 40% of users, you may personally never see the issue. Does that make it not worth talking about?

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#245

Post by kelnos »

sixhobbits wrote: post #8

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.

You do realize that Google only cares about user privacy when it doesn't affect their own business model to do so, right? And also, like in this case, where not caring could end up creating some nasty headlines that hurt their reputation?

Meanwhile, Google probably has one of the most comprehensive databases on the planet of user behavior, gleaned from tracking their users all over the internet. Surveillance capitalism at its finest. But hey, they protect people from accidentally sending their photo geolocations to random websites, so good job Google, pat on the back for you.

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#246

Post by kelnos »

rickdeckard wrote: post #216
andybak wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But surely there's a way to do this without totally killing valuable functionality? It's like the Android Sideloading debate all over again. Something that is very useful to 1% of users is stripped away. And we end up with dumb appliances (and ironically - most likely still no privacy )

Seems to be quite simple, an App which wants to access this info just needs to set the permission for it. Chrome doesn't seem to request that permission, so the OS doesn't provide the location-data to the app. So Chrome rather ended up in this state by doing nothing, not by explicitly doing something ... If your app targets Android 10 (API level 29) or higher and needs to retrieve unredacted EXIF metadata from photos…

That's not sufficient. We need a standardized attribute on the HTML form to request the permission as well. If Chrome requests the permission, great, but that's not fine-grained enough for a web browser.

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#247

Post by kelnos »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #190
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

This is honestly a horrible argument. Any app on Android can still get EXIF data

You're replying to someone who is talking about a native app, but the overall issue here is about web apps. Chrome and Firefox don't request the appropriate permission (which, as things stand right now, is probably the safer choice), and there's no way for a website to signal to the browser that it wants that permission, so that the browser could prompt the user only for websites that ask for it, and persist the allow/deny response, similarly to how general location permission works via the JS location APIs.

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#248

Post by saltcured »

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.

Or the permission prompt isn't clearly worded or precise enough to understand whether you are allowing the location of this one photo to be shared, versus agreeing to some ongoing tracking...

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#249

Post by bilsbie »

nozzlegear wrote: post #68
bilsbie wrote: post #53

Does iPhone do this? Kind of scary to be accidentally sending your home address anywhere you upload a photo.

You can choose whether you want to share the location or not when selecting photos in iOS. You'll see at the bottom a label that says "Location is included", and you can click the three dots to remove location: https://imgur.com/a/lm0stDE Not sure if there's a way to do that by default, I've never checked.

Interesting. How does it work for texting?

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#250

Post by rickdeckard »

kelnos wrote: post #246
rickdeckard wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems to be quite simple, an App which wants to access this info just needs to set the permission for it. Chrome doesn't seem to request that permission, so the OS doesn't provide the location-data to the app. So Chrome rather ended up in this state by doing nothing, not by explicitly doing something ... If your app targets Android 10 (API level 29) or higher and needs to retrieve unredacted EXIF metadata from photos…

That's not sufficient. We need a standardized attribute on the HTML form to request the permission as well. If Chrome requests the permission, great, but that's not fine-grained enough for a web browser.

Well yes, agree, but as stated Chrome didn't end up with this behavior because they did something, the Browser behaves like this because they didn't implement any logic for this permission.

A standardized attribute on an HTML-form would be difficult to define, because in this context the page just requests/receives a binary file, so a generic "strip embedded location information" decision from the user would be hard to enforce and uphold (also, by whom?).

In this case Android only knows the file-structure and EXIF because the file is requested by Chrome from a Media Library in the OS, not a file-manager.

W3C keeps thinking about this data-minimization topic repeatedly [0], so far they managed to define the principles [1], but enforcing them technically is quite hard if any kind of content can be submitted from a storage to a webpage...

[0] https://www.w3.org/blog/2019/adding-another-permission/

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/security-privacy-questionnaire/#data-m...

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