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.
A colleague of mine tried doing this after a large sturgeon die off in the San Francisco Bay a few years ago. Citizens were asked to upload photos of dead sturgeon washed up on beaches. They actually got pretty good data (sturgeon are very easily identifiable) and lots of participation, but the location data ending up being largely useless because it was fuzzed (I think by iOS?) to a large enough degree to no longer be helpful, and the fields for manual coordinate entry had very low usage
> 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.
I'd wager 90% of the photos on Google Maps associated with various listings don't actually know their photos are in public. I keep coming across selfies and other photos that look very personal, but somehow someone uploaded to Google Maps, the photo is next to a store or something and Google somehow linked them together, probably by EXIF.
Google Maps app sees that you took photo near POI and later in the day asks you in notification if you want to share it on maps.
You review the photo and go "lol, sure".
At least for me that doesn't even feel like posting due to how frictionless it is and that it's about natural discoverability (someone has to click that POI and scroll through photos to find it).
I had a popup on my iPhone one day "You were in City Park last weekend, would you like to share those photos?". I stopped allowing google access to my photos after that. A little late though, they had apparently scraped all of my data already.
I had a similar moment a few years ago. That Google Maps pop-up was what caused me to first switch to de-googled Android, and once that turned out to be a hassle after a couple of years, switch to an iPhone without Google stuff. (On Android, Google is a location provider, so blocking their access is much harder.)
I suspect there used to be a flow which was far too easy to share directly to Google maps. I was browsing the map once and found a picture of a credit card in a room in a hotel. I guess the guy intended to send it to his PA or something.
I have friends that do that and it’s intentional. Had a good time at a store or restaurant? Take a selfie and upload to Google Maps. Also take a selfie video and upload to Instagram stories. It’s a way of life that defaults to more sharing.
I wish they'd just switch to fuzzing the location instead of stripping it entirely. Instead of specifying 6 digits of lat/lon, publish 1 digit to identify what rough area you're in (to about 10km).
I've done a lot of neat projects with geolocation over the years. Including a personal travel diary, a bunch of visualizations of tweets and Flickr photos, etc etc. I am sad that's become nearly impossible but I do respect that most people don't understand the privacy risk.
Meanwhile on the advertising backend Google knows your exact location and is using it to help third parties target ads to you. And sleazy apps like Grindr sell location streams to anyone who asks. The bad guys get this data, just not the useful apps.
It'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.
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.
People act like Google products are a charity that had been free forever, and then this mega-corp called Google came along and started harvesting the data of innocent people who just want to get directions to Starbucks.
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.
It looks like you can't revoke the internet permission, but you can use the firewall via ADB. Settings are lost on reboot, but you can use an automation with Tasker or similar to set them on boot:
iOS allows this, but only on mobile data, which is pretty infuriating. Why should I not be able to also restrict apps from dialing home/anywhere just because I'm on a Wi-Fi network (which isn't even necessarily unmetered)?
It's really annoying. I have a sudoku game on my phone, works great but give it internet access and it's suddenly full of sketchy adverts.
If I'm playing it on my commute, it's usable with mobile data disabled for the app. But when the train stops in a station long enough to auto-connect to wifi, immediate full screen adverts :(
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.
You can probably get around this problem by compressing the file and uploading it in a .zip. Google Files allows for making zip files at least, so I don't think it's a rare feature.
I think the linked spec suggestion makes the most sense: make the feature opt-in in the file picker, probably require the user to grant location permissions when uploading files with EXIF location information.
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
I don't know when Google's EXIF protections are supposed to kick in, but so far my photos auto-synced to Nextcloud still contain location information as expected.
I don't think this has anything to do with Google Photos. People fall victim to doxxing or stalking or even location history tracking by third party apps all the time because they don't realize their pictures contain location information. 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.
100% agreed; people generally don't realize how deanonymizing EXIF data can be.
I remember one of my cameras or phones including a "seconds since device startup" counter; together with the exact time the photo was taken, this yields a precise timestamp of when a phone was last restarted. This by itself can be highly deanonymizing out of a small to medium sized set of candidate phones/photographers.
Seems like such a shitty thing to victimize the potential victim. But… if you didn’t know that images you took had metadata… maybe you shouldn’t be allowed to use a computer. I mean. I’m going on decades of knowing this. Feel like there is a mid 90s X-Files episode that even like breaks this down. If not NCIS or some shit.
Even people who know it, don't think about it and don't connect it with the potential consequences of uploading a picture to a website. And why would they? It's not visible, there's no warning, it's just not something that's going to be top of mind.
I agree with you. The next steps should be to disable the internet nationwide like North Korea. People have no idea how much bad things are there. Also I don't like fun things.
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.
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
If your camera (or phone) uses the DCF standard [0], you will eventually end up with duplicates when you hit IMG_9999.JPG and it loops around to IMG_0001.JPG. Filename alone is an unreliable indicator.
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 invasive, it can stop writing them that way.
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 only with the exported JPEGs. I do want to see all my photos on a map based on the location they were taken, and I want a timestamp. Locally. Not when I share a photo with a third party.
> If Google feels that the location tags and filenames are unacceptably invasive, it can stop writing them that way.
Something can be "not invasive" when only done locally, but turn out to be a bad idea when you share publicly. Not hard to imagine a lot of users want to organize their libraries by location in a easy way, but still not share the location of every photo they share online.
> How many users are uploading photos from their camera to their phone so they can then upload them from the phone to the web?
To _their phone_ specifically? Probably almost nobody. But to their Google/Apple Photos library?
A lot, if not most of people who use DSLRs and other point-and-shoot cameras. Most people want a single library of photos, not segregated based on which device they shot it on.
I use to send pictures over the camera wifi from my Sony W500 to my phone. The main purpose is backup (think I'm in the middle of nowhere or with little internet for days) and then to send them to friends with WhatsApp. If I'm at home I pull the SD card and read it from my laptop. It's quicker.
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 automatically.
While I think it's the right move to disable location tags by default, I also think Google should've waited until a solution to the missing functionality had at least hit the WHATWG spec.
I don't like this. The Right Thing is for camera apps to not add location metadata by default.
If you go in and turn location on (which should have a warning on it), then you're the sort of person who changes defaults, a more sophisticated user than the majority of the population who is able to take responsibility for the consequences. Yes, I can imagine a scenario where someone ends up with this setting turned on through no fault of their own, but it shouldn't be the role of an OS vendor to prevent every possible mistake.
Yes, I get it. It is inconvenient for legitimate uses. The problem is that our devices leak too much confidential data. Privacy was mentioned outright in the article. Safety/security was alluded to with an example, which is something that goes far beyond a company's image or even liability.
Unfortunately, there is no good way to solve the problem while maintaining convenience. As the author noted, prompts while uploading don't really work. Application defaults don't really work for web browsers, since what is acceptable for one website isn't necessarily acceptable for another. Having the user enter the location through the website make the user aware of the information being disclosed, but it is inconvenient.
Does the situation suck? Yes. On the other hand, I think Google is doing the responsible thing here.
I don't know a good solution for this. 99% of websites asking for this hypothetical permission would not deserve it. Users (rightfully) don't expect that uploading a photo leaks their location.
Element (the matrix client) used to not strip geolocation metadata for the longest time. I don't know if they fixed that yet.
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.
Already use imagepipe [0] since forever, sometimes it takes soms extra time, still worth the effort. Most of the time I take a picture share with imagepipe, share with external and don't share anything else
I will never share my location via images with anybody then myself. I do use location for my local Photoprism on my own server
>So, can users transfer their photos via Bluetooth or QuickShare? .. Literally the only way to get a photo with geolocation intact is to plug in a USB cable
Bluetooth is not QuickShare, stop conflating them. Bluetooth works. I just tried it. It just sends the entire file to the destination, filename intact with all EXIF, no gimmicks, tricks, or extra toggles. As it has always done for 20+ years.
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.
Surprisingly iOS doesn't do this - at least not for photos uploaded via a web form these days. Try this tool to see that (it should demonstrate the Android EXIF stripping behavior too): https://tools.simonwillison.net/exif
iOS does this by default too, but it tells you about it and gives you the option to not strip the location from EXIF: the bottom of the photo picker has the text "Location not included", and the context menu opened by the "..." button on the left has a "Location" toggle. Just tested this myself on iOS 26.4.1.
I just tested this and the default setting is to include location, but once turned off it stays off (unlike the iPhone share sheet where you need to turn it off each time).
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:
defaulting to strip location on share, fine. demoting plain old <input type=file> into "find a usb cable" / "go build an app" is a hell of a line to draw
> 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 could have consulted their community. It's just too big. So when the author says:
> Because Google run an anticompetitive monopoly on their dominant mobile operating system.
I don't think the problem here is that Google is anticompetitive (though that's a problem in other areas). I think it's just too big that they can't possibly consult with any meaningful percentage of their 1 billion customers (or however many Android users are out there). They may also feel it's impossible to educate their users about the benefits and dangers of embedded location information (just thinking about myself personally, I'm certain that I'd struggle to convey they nuances of embedded location data to my parents).
I will note that Google Photos seems to happily let you add images to shared albums with embedded location information. I can't recall if you get any privacy-related warnings or notices.
> 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."
Yes. You can turn it off for Camera if you don't want the geotag to be included in the photo when taken. You can also, as part of the share media picker, opt to include or exclude location data on the photo.
Pretty good. I played a bit with gpt-4 a year or so ago by feeding it random screenshots from Google street view. It will pick up a lot of subtle hints from what otherwise looks like generic streets. I imagine more recent models might be better at this now.
I wonder if that might be another reason to just completely disable this feature and not make it a permission: otherwise people could use it to build trainingsets for geoguesser models.
Couldn't you use <input type="file" accept=".jpg,.jpeg"> (different than image/jpeg mime-type I think, not sure if that also strips EXIF?), then manually parse the EXIF in JS? Shouldn't be that complicated to parse and I'm guessing there is a bunch of libraries for doing just that should you not want to do that yourself.
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.
A colleague of mine tried doing this after a large sturgeon die off in the San Francisco Bay a few years ago. Citizens were asked to upload photos of dead sturgeon washed up on beaches. They actually got pretty good data (sturgeon are very easily identifiable) and lots of participation, but the location data ending up being largely useless because it was fuzzed (I think by iOS?) to a large enough degree to no longer be helpful, and the fields for manual coordinate entry had very low usage
> 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.
I'd wager 90% of the photos on Google Maps associated with various listings don't actually know their photos are in public. I keep coming across selfies and other photos that look very personal, but somehow someone uploaded to Google Maps, the photo is next to a store or something and Google somehow linked them together, probably by EXIF.
Google prompts you in Google Maps if you want to upload your picture to Maps.
I sometimes do that for random pictures, even like selfies, which I don't mind popping up there.
Wait... You post selfies on Google Maps? The thought never crossed my mind. What would the purpose be? Sorry I'm probably thick...
I can say for me that after my father died I posted pictures of him at some of his favorite places or from favorite trips.
Google Maps app sees that you took photo near POI and later in the day asks you in notification if you want to share it on maps.
You review the photo and go "lol, sure".
At least for me that doesn't even feel like posting due to how frictionless it is and that it's about natural discoverability (someone has to click that POI and scroll through photos to find it).
About the latter: that's why Google Maps is my favourite social medium. It's hyper-local.
I had a popup on my iPhone one day "You were in City Park last weekend, would you like to share those photos?". I stopped allowing google access to my photos after that. A little late though, they had apparently scraped all of my data already.
I had a similar moment a few years ago. That Google Maps pop-up was what caused me to first switch to de-googled Android, and once that turned out to be a hassle after a couple of years, switch to an iPhone without Google stuff. (On Android, Google is a location provider, so blocking their access is much harder.)
I suspect there used to be a flow which was far too easy to share directly to Google maps. I was browsing the map once and found a picture of a credit card in a room in a hotel. I guess the guy intended to send it to his PA or something.
I have friends that do that and it’s intentional. Had a good time at a store or restaurant? Take a selfie and upload to Google Maps. Also take a selfie video and upload to Instagram stories. It’s a way of life that defaults to more sharing.
I wish they'd just switch to fuzzing the location instead of stripping it entirely. Instead of specifying 6 digits of lat/lon, publish 1 digit to identify what rough area you're in (to about 10km).
I've done a lot of neat projects with geolocation over the years. Including a personal travel diary, a bunch of visualizations of tweets and Flickr photos, etc etc. I am sad that's become nearly impossible but I do respect that most people don't understand the privacy risk.
Meanwhile on the advertising backend Google knows your exact location and is using it to help third parties target ads to you. And sleazy apps like Grindr sell location streams to anyone who asks. The bad guys get this data, just not the useful apps.
It'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.
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.
It's not great for revenue, it is their revenue.
People act like Google products are a charity that had been free forever, and then this mega-corp called Google came along and started harvesting the data of innocent people who just want to get directions to Starbucks.
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.
Netguard No Root Firewall still works for me: https://github.com/M66B/NetGuard
It looks like you can't revoke the internet permission, but you can use the firewall via ADB. Settings are lost on reboot, but you can use an automation with Tasker or similar to set them on boot:
https://www.reddit.com/r/tasker/comments/1mxjnvs/how_to_bloc...
iOS allows this, but only on mobile data, which is pretty infuriating. Why should I not be able to also restrict apps from dialing home/anywhere just because I'm on a Wi-Fi network (which isn't even necessarily unmetered)?
It's really annoying. I have a sudoku game on my phone, works great but give it internet access and it's suddenly full of sketchy adverts.
If I'm playing it on my commute, it's usable with mobile data disabled for the app. But when the train stops in a station long enough to auto-connect to wifi, immediate full screen adverts :(
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.
I also don't trust my government. So should I just degovernment completely? Sounds just as practical or realistic for most people.
You’re saying moving on from Google is similar to switching government?
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.
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 )
You can probably get around this problem by compressing the file and uploading it in a .zip. Google Files allows for making zip files at least, so I don't think it's a rare feature.
I think the linked spec suggestion makes the most sense: make the feature opt-in in the file picker, probably require the user to grant location permissions when uploading files with EXIF location information.
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
I don't know when Google's EXIF protections are supposed to kick in, but so far my photos auto-synced to Nextcloud still contain location information as expected.
I don't think this has anything to do with Google Photos. People fall victim to doxxing or stalking or even location history tracking by third party apps all the time because they don't realize their pictures contain location information. 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.
100% agreed; people generally don't realize how deanonymizing EXIF data can be.
I remember one of my cameras or phones including a "seconds since device startup" counter; together with the exact time the photo was taken, this yields a precise timestamp of when a phone was last restarted. This by itself can be highly deanonymizing out of a small to medium sized set of candidate phones/photographers.
Seems like such a shitty thing to victimize the potential victim. But… if you didn’t know that images you took had metadata… maybe you shouldn’t be allowed to use a computer. I mean. I’m going on decades of knowing this. Feel like there is a mid 90s X-Files episode that even like breaks this down. If not NCIS or some shit.
Even people who know it, don't think about it and don't connect it with the potential consequences of uploading a picture to a website. And why would they? It's not visible, there's no warning, it's just not something that's going to be top of mind.
So we should educate people about it. Don't you think that constantly coddling people about tech just breeds tech-illiterate people?
Wouldn't it be better if people were more tech-literate?
Coddling only works when those who are in charge of the tech play nice. But then breeds people who will more easily fall victim to the bad actors.
100% of the people that don't know that HN exists, most likely don't know images have metadata.
On reddit half of "the is it AI?" question are answered by "Yes, it say so in the metadata".
AFAIK a lot of the bigger sites / services already hide or outright strip EXIF.
Its better to do it from the source, obviously.
Because most people have no idea how the tools they chose to buy and operate work, the few rational people who educate themselves have to suffer...
This sounds like a downward spiral concerning freedom.
You don't have to be irrational to not know things.
I agree with you. The next steps should be to disable the internet nationwide like North Korea. People have no idea how much bad things are there. Also I don't like fun things.
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).
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
"Obviously"
There are plenty of use cases where the filename is relevant (and many, many people intentionally use the image name for sorting / cataloging).
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.
If your camera (or phone) uses the DCF standard [0], you will eventually end up with duplicates when you hit IMG_9999.JPG and it loops around to IMG_0001.JPG. Filename alone is an unreliable indicator.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_rule_for_Camera_File_sy...
> it will be impossible if the filename changes.
Not impossible, just different and arguably better - comparing hashes is a better tool for finding duplicates.
^ facts
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 invasive, it can stop writing them that way.
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 only with the exported JPEGs. I do want to see all my photos on a map based on the location they were taken, and I want a timestamp. Locally. Not when I share a photo with a third party.
It is not just a default when it is the only option.
The word default is more appropriately used when the decision can be changed to something the user finds more suitable for their usecase
> Anything in the browser: not my private space.
Google’s main business is ads, ie running hostile code on your machine.
> If Google feels that the location tags and filenames are unacceptably invasive, it can stop writing them that way.
Something can be "not invasive" when only done locally, but turn out to be a bad idea when you share publicly. Not hard to imagine a lot of users want to organize their libraries by location in a easy way, but still not share the location of every photo they share online.
Definitely. I want to be able to search my Google Photos for "Berlin" and get me all the pictures I took there.
> How many users are uploading photos from their camera to their phone so they can then upload them from the phone to the web?
To _their phone_ specifically? Probably almost nobody. But to their Google/Apple Photos library?
A lot, if not most of people who use DSLRs and other point-and-shoot cameras. Most people want a single library of photos, not segregated based on which device they shot it on.
I do it all the time for different reasons:
- have a local backup - being able to see them from a larger screen - being able to share them - sync them to home while I am away
I don't upload anything to google photos or apple cloud.
I use to send pictures over the camera wifi from my Sony W500 to my phone. The main purpose is backup (think I'm in the middle of nowhere or with little internet for days) and then to send them to friends with WhatsApp. If I'm at home I pull the SD card and read it from my laptop. It's quicker.
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 automatically.
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
While I think it's the right move to disable location tags by default, I also think Google should've waited until a solution to the missing functionality had at least hit the WHATWG spec.
I don't like this. The Right Thing is for camera apps to not add location metadata by default.
If you go in and turn location on (which should have a warning on it), then you're the sort of person who changes defaults, a more sophisticated user than the majority of the population who is able to take responsibility for the consequences. Yes, I can imagine a scenario where someone ends up with this setting turned on through no fault of their own, but it shouldn't be the role of an OS vendor to prevent every possible mistake.
Yes, I get it. It is inconvenient for legitimate uses. The problem is that our devices leak too much confidential data. Privacy was mentioned outright in the article. Safety/security was alluded to with an example, which is something that goes far beyond a company's image or even liability.
Unfortunately, there is no good way to solve the problem while maintaining convenience. As the author noted, prompts while uploading don't really work. Application defaults don't really work for web browsers, since what is acceptable for one website isn't necessarily acceptable for another. Having the user enter the location through the website make the user aware of the information being disclosed, but it is inconvenient.
Does the situation suck? Yes. On the other hand, I think Google is doing the responsible thing here.
I don't know a good solution for this. 99% of websites asking for this hypothetical permission would not deserve it. Users (rightfully) don't expect that uploading a photo leaks their location.
Element (the matrix client) used to not strip geolocation metadata for the longest time. I don't know if they fixed that yet.
For 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.
Already use imagepipe [0] since forever, sometimes it takes soms extra time, still worth the effort. Most of the time I take a picture share with imagepipe, share with external and don't share anything else
I will never share my location via images with anybody then myself. I do use location for my local Photoprism on my own server
0 https://codeberg.org/Starfish/Imagepipe#how-to-get-the-app
>So, can users transfer their photos via Bluetooth or QuickShare? .. Literally the only way to get a photo with geolocation intact is to plug in a USB cable
Bluetooth is not QuickShare, stop conflating them. Bluetooth works. I just tried it. It just sends the entire file to the destination, filename intact with all EXIF, no gimmicks, tricks, or extra toggles. As it has always done for 20+ years.
OP here. I'm not conflating them. That's why I used the word "or".
I don't know how modern your Android phone is, but on all of mine sharing via Bluetooth strips away some of the EXIF.
This must be a Chrome thing, not an Android thing, no? I didn't test this but I'd be surprised if Firefox behaved the same.
Or Firefox would still be using android's file system / upload process, which probably hands off the photos with geotags stripped already.
I'm pretty sure this is what happens in the iPhone at least, so I'd imagine it is the same in Android.
Just tested with Firefox 149 on Android 13. There are no coordinates when I upload an image to EXIF viewer web sites.
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.
GrapheneOS only exists because Google hasn't yet completely closed shop on AOSP availability.
Who knows, it may eventually be only available on Motorola devices.
I don't think that's quite right. Up until recently I was able to share photos with geolocation from my GrapheneOS device.
> Android can't stop copying GOS.
Well that's a good thing, isn't it?
Good?
Surprisingly iOS doesn't do this - at least not for photos uploaded via a web form these days. Try this tool to see that (it should demonstrate the Android EXIF stripping behavior too): https://tools.simonwillison.net/exif
iOS does this by default too, but it tells you about it and gives you the option to not strip the location from EXIF: the bottom of the photo picker has the text "Location not included", and the context menu opened by the "..." button on the left has a "Location" toggle. Just tested this myself on iOS 26.4.1.
I just tested this and the default setting is to include location, but once turned off it stays off (unlike the iPhone share sheet where you need to turn it off each time).
Thanks, just found that option hidden in the "..." and then "Options" menu: https://gist.github.com/simonw/6d530cdca574ac56450dfa805f25e...
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
defaulting to strip location on share, fine. demoting plain old <input type=file> into "find a usb cable" / "go build an app" is a hell of a line to draw
Nice drunk theme! All web site should have one.
The author wrote about it here: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/09/drunk-css/
> 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 could have consulted their community. It's just too big. So when the author says:
> Because Google run an anticompetitive monopoly on their dominant mobile operating system.
I don't think the problem here is that Google is anticompetitive (though that's a problem in other areas). I think it's just too big that they can't possibly consult with any meaningful percentage of their 1 billion customers (or however many Android users are out there). They may also feel it's impossible to educate their users about the benefits and dangers of embedded location information (just thinking about myself personally, I'm certain that I'd struggle to convey they nuances of embedded location data to my parents).
I will note that Google Photos seems to happily let you add images to shared albums with embedded location information. I can't recall if you get any privacy-related warnings or notices.
> 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."
Is location sharing something you can disable in iOS?
Yes. You can turn it off for Camera if you don't want the geotag to be included in the photo when taken. You can also, as part of the share media picker, opt to include or exclude location data on the photo.
How good are LLMs at geoguessing?
Quite good, per Bellingcat [0] — Google Lens and ChatGPT could localize the majority of their test photos pretty specifically.
[0] https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/2025/08/14/llms-vs-geol...
Pretty good. I played a bit with gpt-4 a year or so ago by feeding it random screenshots from Google street view. It will pick up a lot of subtle hints from what otherwise looks like generic streets. I imagine more recent models might be better at this now.
Pretty good. I test it every now and then from random photos. Sometimes spot on, sometimes gets very close, unless it's really ambiguous.
Basically all up to the training data, as things often are.
I wonder if that might be another reason to just completely disable this feature and not make it a permission: otherwise people could use it to build trainingsets for geoguesser models.
People already uploaded tons of images and data while playing Pokemon GO. Probably model is already has been built and being tested right now
You still need some smarts, since the picture you just took won't be in the training data.
Apple was massively praised when they started stripping location data from shared and uploaded photos.
Couldn't you use <input type="file" accept=".jpg,.jpeg"> (different than image/jpeg mime-type I think, not sure if that also strips EXIF?), then manually parse the EXIF in JS? Shouldn't be that complicated to parse and I'm guessing there is a bunch of libraries for doing just that should you not want to do that yourself.