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.

> 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.

> actually using the geolocation is an extremely niche usecase for images uploaded from mobile browsers

Is it only for mobile browsers? The article makes it sound [0] as if it is a general thing, even when sharing through bluetooth, and that only copying the image via usb connection allows you to keep geolocation in exif. Not sure what happens when you upload to native apps, eg to some cloud storage app (photo specific or not). I definitely want my location to stay when I make a cloud backup of my photos with an app intended for that.

[0] Quote:

>> Using a "Progressive Web App" doesn't work either. So, can users transfer their photos via Bluetooth or QuickShare? No. That's now broken as well. You can't even directly share via email without the location being stripped away. Literally the only way to get a photo with geolocation intact is to plug in a USB cable, copy the photo to your computer, and then upload it via a desktop web browser?

> extremely niche usecase

Phones are computers though, it’s not up to Google or Apple to decide what’s a good use case for my own pictures.

I'm gonna die on this hill, but silently attaching very sensitive PII (including exact lat/lon) to photos has always been a terrible anti-feature. One of those "WTF were they actually thinking?" terrible anti-features. Imagine if you created a word document and Microsoft silently attached your home address to them as metadata. Awful and totally unexpected to the vast majority of users.

I want the location on every time, without exception.

The current behavior is exactly what I wanted.

These "all users are imbeciles that need our protection" design pattern needs to die a swift death.

It's maddening, We're constantly taking kitchen knives and replacing them with the colorful plastic toddler version and still have the same cutting tasks.

On that point I would agree - I never used that. But Google also lied why it wanted to destroy ublock origin. It was clear to everyone that they did it because people can break away from ads infiltrating their computers. I can't use the modern www anymore without general content blocker; ublock lite is good but nowhere as useful as ublock origin was. I notice this when I compare e. g. firefox with default chrome. So many websites have a totally broken UI. With ublock origin not only can I get rid of popups or ads but also horrible UI choices. I use that on so many websites to simplify them.