alt Hacker NewsIt'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.
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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 )
It's not that hard to add a little checkmark "include location" under it, rather than unconditionally remove it.
As per op, it seems they've shut down _any_ means for you to get the data out of the phone other than using a USB cable.
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.
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.
This kills an entire class of useful crowdsourcing web apps though. Just off the top of my head, contributing to OSM is much easier when you can just take a bunch of photos and see them displayed on a map.
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.
You do realize that Google only cares about user privacy when it doesn't affect their own business model to do so, right? And also, like in this case, where not caring could end up creating some nasty headlines that hurt their reputation?
Meanwhile, Google probably has one of the most comprehensive databases on the planet of user behavior, gleaned from tracking their users all over the internet. Surveillance capitalism at its finest. But hey, they protect people from accidentally sending their photo geolocations to random websites, so good job Google, pat on the back for you.
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.
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.
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.