alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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Totally disagree, as I think that would be the worst of all possible worlds - too fuzzy to be useful for many of the niche use cases where it's needed, and still a privacy violation for the majority of users who don't know their photos reveal their location.
The other suggestion about requiring something like a useLocation or includeExif attribute on the file picker, and then requiring confirmation from the user, seems like a much better solution to me.
Depending on how populated your current location is, even a fuzzed location can reveal personal information. In a city, 10km is fine, nobody is identified. But if your home is the only one for 10km in any direction, and your fuzzing threshold is 10km, you've identified down to a single home.