261–270 of 330 posts
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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.
You have been paying attention to what’s going on haven’t you?
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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.
You have way more faith in the government not using any information it has against you than I do…. You have been paying attention to what’s going on haven’t you?
By framing the problem as being with untrustworthy government agencies rather than with greedy data brokers selling data everywhere, you are part of the problem. You may distrust your government as much as you'd like, but before we solve the problems with private data brokers, we can never improve the situation.
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…
I for one am glad that that's the trained reaction of the masses
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".
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…
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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 permis…
You don't have this option?
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On Android 16. Open photo. Hit share. Hit Bluetooth. Pick a device to send it to. Wait for xfer to finish. Observe in exifview. What detail is missing?
All the GPS data are nulled / set to zero.
Location data should be opt in on capture, a checkbox deep in the settings: "capture location meta data" would be sufficient, or a button similar to the flash. Strange UI that they are involuntarily capturing but then removing it.
I like having location in my photo album (so I can easily search for vacation photos, or figure out where a photo was taken), but I don't want it stored in the photo metadata I share the photo. Is there any way to have Apple or Google photos track the location when the photo is uploaded, but not store it in the photo itself?
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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' locatio…
I'm sure I recall much older Android versions presenting all of the app's permissions at install-time. I'm very willing to bet that most users didn't actually read any of it. Overall, it seems like a very interesting problem to solve.