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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

#71

Post by [deleted] »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #6
iamcalledrob wrote: post #3

Similarly, 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).

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…

[deleted]

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#73

Post by amazingamazing »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #63
amazingamazing wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has your location either way. What difference does it make?

You can lock down their usage. Limit it to three months storage and minimize sharing. They still report an old address for home and work for me since I dialed up the restrictions years ago. They have the data but it is less exposed.

I honestly don’t understand the scenario you’re defending against. Google still knows where you actually live and work trivially. If you don’t trust Google you should just de-Google completely.

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#74

Post by master-lincoln »

adzm wrote: post #29

This is the right move. https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11724#issuecomment-419... and adding a feature to browsers to explicitly use the info is the best solution really. The problem is that there was a change without a backup solution without making a native app, but preventing people from accidentally uploading their location in an image is the right move. It really needs to be more well known and handled aut…

I would agree if they switched the order: first make a UI to opt-in/out and then change the default. Now they just made operations impossible

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#76

Post by sambellll »

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.

I feel like that's the optimal implementation - best of both worlds

Wish android copied them for once lol

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#77

Post by edent »

flipped wrote: post #37

GrapheneOS already does this, since forever. Android can't stop copying GOS. Maybe they'll add a network toggle after a few years and call it a privacy win.

I don't think that's quite right. Up until recently I was able to share photos with geolocation from my GrapheneOS device.

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#78

Post by lukan »

sathackr wrote: post #69
edgineer wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not all-or-nothing; sometimes some people at Google push for some things to improve privacy. Rarely happens when revenue is at stake. Android used to ask you "do you want to alllow internet access?" as an app permission. Google removed that, as it would stop ads from showing up. Devastating change for privacy and security, great for revenue.

GrapheneOS still does this -- allows controlling internet access on a per-app basis.

For those of us stuck on normal android, is there a way to achieve that? I know it used to work with some firewall apps but nowdays they all require root access.

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#79

Post by Shalomboy »

ieie3366 wrote: post #4

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 citizens. Turns out the application was just a form that they asked people to fill out. I suggested they ask for user photos and scrape the EXIF data or ask them to opt-into sending their location and got laughed out of the room. Turns out that they discovered users immediately nope out of government websites that ask for their location! What a shame.

Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

#80

Post by edent »

eminence32 wrote: post #24

> But it is just so tiresome that Google never consults their community. There was no advance notice of this change that I could find. Just a bunch of frustrated users in my inbox blaming me for breaking something. I get it. This unequivocally sucks. It's a clear loss of functionality for a group of people who are educated about the advantages and disadvantages of embedded EXIF data. But I don't honestly think Google…

> But I don't honestly think Google could have consulted their community. It's just too big.

The thing is, they frequently do. They have developer relations people, they publish blog posts about breaking changes, they work with W3C and other standards bodies, they reply on bug trackers.

But, in this case, nothing. Just a unilateral change with no communication. Not even a blog posts saying "As of April, this functionality is deprecated."

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