But it's not even about exif data. If I simply post a picture of another person or a person's house or let's say the example I did earlier today a picture of an Amazon truck parked in a handicap spot that violates this policy. Because simply looking at that image you can identify the location of it.
I think the EXIF data is removed because, for the vast majority of people that don't think to remove it, it's a safety risk. Posting a picture of your house? Your kid arriving at their first day of school? Some other location you'd rather a bad person not have info on? Most people don't think to remove that data before posting (and sometimes post directly from their phone camera?)... removing that data removes a lot of risk for them. Leaving it in is only considered a small benefit to a smaller subset of people (comparatively)
Most people know this, but still continue to upload images without stripping the EXIF data. I think it's just convenient to not strip it, but they pay with an invasion into their privacy. If I recall correctly, Twitter strips EXIF information so you don't accidentally reveal your location and other metadata.
Especially a bad policy because some of the business data associated with the photos is wrong. So, just because I don't want to associate a photo with a restaurant means the location data is deleted.
Be careful about posting your phone camera images publicly if you’re protective of your privacy. Some social media trim location and other sensitive EXIF tags, but it’s best to not trust them.
I'm not sure why the downvotes. A lot of photos on Flickr have GPS information encoded. (And of course the photos themselves can often be connected to individuals through either their metadata or facial recognition.) Photos can absolutely be personal information.
Good! I don't post photos of my kids on the internet and I get so annoyed when other people take it upon themselves to post them for me. Clearview AI has made it even more clear than it already was that any data you give these companies can and will be used against you.
It's not obvious. You are uploading a photo to send to a friend, you don't know or expect that where this photo was taken is automatically used by Facebook to target you. Hell, most people wouldn't even know that the EXIF has the location.
The point of not wanting photos of you or your house spread around the internet isn't to make it physically impossible to see you, but to restrict that privilege to the people you actually (want to) physically interact with.
Here is an interesting question. Is it at that point your data? Wouldn't it be the data of who ever took the photo? Why would it belong to you just because you are in the photo?
I think giving users power over auto tagging make sense. But giving users power over other people's photos is a terrible idea.
My camera was stolen this week and if someone uses my camera, takes a picture, and posts it to Facebook, they get away with it, because Facebook strips out the EXIF data when photos are uploaded, making it impossible to see if someone is using your camera.
It's already not in the EXIF data anyways. Instagram API is assigning its own geo tag to it, so why bother with all the extra info that they don't need to track?
Granted, still a dick move– they could just store it, but I think you're imagining that they're going to strip EXIF data (which they already do anyways)
> Metadata in images serves no other purpose than invading privacy
I don't upload my photos anywhere public. I keep metadata on so I can sort them by location. Uploading photos to the public web is really what is invading your privacy.
Because if a service offers to automatically tag my photos, I don’t expect random people looking at them. In fact, I don’t want anyone looking at my family photos other than those whom I explicitly gave permission to do so.
Same applies to my voice recordings. Same applies to my receipts. Same applies to my health data.
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