[dead]
Android now stops you sharing your location in photos
41–50 of 330 posts
Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos
#42For most users, I think this is a good change.
I used to run a small website that allowed users to upload pictures. Most people were not aware that they were telling me where they were, when the picture was taken, their altitude, which direction they were facing, etc.
Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos
#43It'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.
If google really cared about privacy, they wouldn't have moved maps away from a subdomain. now if I want maps to have my location (logical), I need to grant google _search_ my location too.
I'm not sure I follow. maps.google.com still resolves?
Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos
#44It'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.
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 )
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
Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
If google really cared about privacy, they wouldn't have moved maps away from a subdomain. now if I want maps to have my location (logical), I need to grant google _search_ my location too.
I'm not sure I follow. maps.google.com still resolves?
maps.google.com now redirects to google.com/maps and has done for the past few years.
Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos
#46Similarly, the native Android photo picker strips the original filename. This causes daily customer support issues, where people keep asking the app developer why they're renaming their files. https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/268079113 Status: Won't Fix (Intended Behavior).
Obviously an image picker shouldn't leak filenames... The filename is a property of the directory entry storing the file storing the image. The image picker only grants access to the image, not to directories, directory entries or files. If you want filenames, you need to request access to a directory, not to an image
The path is different than the filename though. If I want to find duplicates, it will be impossible if the filename changes. In my use case
/User/user/Images/20240110/happy_birthday.jpg
and
/User/user/Desktop/happy_birthday.jpg
are the same image.
Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos
#47It'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.
If google really cared about privacy, they wouldn't have moved maps away from a subdomain. now if I want maps to have my location (logical), I need to grant google _search_ my location too.
Google has your location either way. What difference does it make?
Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos
#48defaulting to strip location on share, fine. demoting plain old into "find a usb cable" / "go build an app" is a hell of a line to draw
Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
This a very weird set of choices by Google. How many users are uploading photos from their camera to their phone so they can then upload them from the phone to the web? I bet almost 100% of photo uploads using the default Android photo picker, or the default Android web browser, are of photos that were taken with the default Android camera app. If Google feels that the location tags and filenames are unacceptably inv…
My phone: my private space. Anything in the browser: not my private space. I want exactly that: the OS to translate between that boundary with a sane default. It’s unavoidable to have cases where this is inconvenient or irritating. I don’t even know on iPhone how files are named “internally” (nor do I care), since I do not access the native file system or even file format but in 99% of all use cases come in contact o…
> Anything in the browser: not my private space.
Google’s main business is ads, ie running hostile code on your machine.
Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos
#50It'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.
AFAIK a lot of the bigger sites / services already hide or outright strip EXIF.
Its better to do it from the source, obviously.