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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

#271

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

xorcist wrote: post #262
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

A government agency, which might even have good use for the data, isn't the problem. The problem is sending your precise location to Facebook and a two dozen silly little games and a note app, which all sell this data to anyone and their brother. 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 dis…

The difference is that private brokers don’t have “a monopoly on [legslized] violence”. Facebook doesn’t have an army of masked jack booted thugs with military gear.

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#272

Post by rstuart4133 »

I suspect this horse has bolted. When I see a photo on a website and I want to know where it's taken, I assume it's been stripped already and ask an AI. The accuracy is uncanny.

Since it's a rare web site that leaves the EXIF data intact, I guess this is aimed at apps harvesting photos on the device itself. I hope Firefox gets a new site permission that allows you to upload photos with the EXIF intact, because that's often what I want. But that won't happen for a while, and until apps do get their permissions updated it's going to be annoying. It will be a right proper PITA to discover later your EXIF data is gone from the photos you transferred to your laptop.

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#273

Post by nozzlegear »

bilsbie wrote: post #249
nozzlegear wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I just checked in iMessage. When you add an attachment and select photos, you get the same picker that the rest of the OS uses, it's just in a collapsed state. If you swipe up, it'll expand to fill the screen and that same "Location is included" label and configuration menu is available.

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#274

Post by drnick1 »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #184
drnick1 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use IronFox or Fennec, preferably on GrapheneOS. You won't have freedom on Google or Apple controlled devices. I have not seen an ad in years.

Well Apple has had ad blocking extensions for over a decade and full extension support for a few years

Unfortunately, this won't protect you from Apple itself.

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#275

Post by Barbing »

rickdeckard wrote: post #235
Barbing wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pe…

Thank you! Meant my comment for anyone who's not on the very latest version, anyone who experienced Android or another OS with disparate privacy-related behaviors as long as that OS has been around. Yes, now, the issue I'm talking about is solved for the general public on the latest Android devices! At reported cost to power users.

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#276

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

drnick1 wrote: post #274
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well Apple has had ad blocking extensions for over a decade and full extension support for a few years

Unfortunately, this won't protect you from Apple itself.

Why do I need protection from Apple if my goal is not to deal with ads? Unless you are making the (very valid) point that you still have to deal with ads in the App Store and soon Apple Maps.

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#277

Post by ajifurai »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #179
ajifurai wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my testing, when sharing from apps that use MediaStore like Google Photos or Fossify Gallery (using a `content://media/` URI), the GPS location was stripped even via Bluetooth. This seems to be the default behavior from Android 10 onwards. https://developer.android.com/training/data-storage/shared/m... > Photographs > If your app uses scoped storage, the system hides location information by default When sharing vi…

You're doing it wrong then. I again verified on Android 16 using native Bluetooth sharing.

On my Pixel 9 Pro Fold (Android 16) and Oppo Find X3 Pro (Android 13), when I opened a photo in the Google Photos app and selected Share → Bluetooth, the GPS location was stripped. What app did you share from?

https://i.imgur.com/cwbigQ8.mp4 before: https://i.imgur.com/ixBvA4T.jpeg after (received): https://i.imgur.com/S5fTEG4.jpeg

However, I confirmed that the GPS location remains when sharing an image file that isn't stored in the MediaStore (for example, placed in the same directory as a .nomedia file). In this case, only the Share button is displayed at the bottom of the Photos app, and the shared URI is not `content://com.google.android.apps.photos.contentprovider/0/1/content://media/...` but like `content://com.google.android.apps.photos.contentprovider/-1/1/file:///data/...`. You can check the URI by sharing to Intent Intercept app on F-Droid.

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#278

Post by codethief »

driverdan wrote: post #232
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?

Personal notes, and tons of academic papers and ebooks, all of which might contain question marks and colons. Occasionally, I also use arrows -> in travel itineraries / ticket PDFs.

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#279

Post by codethief »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #265
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…

After throwing away that thing you will never use to creating filenames far beyond 8.3 format, the problem always comes soon after the matter is fully resolved: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29186222

I'm not following?

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#280

Post by Self-Perfection »

This is a push for privacy and it is fundamentally pushes in the opposite direction from let's say "forming accurate knowledge about the world".

How can we combat being mislead by false AI generated images? I'd say keeping track of provenance is what we should adopt, at least as an option. I hope we will find solutions to propagate images over the net reliably keeping how, when and where they were taken.

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