I coulda sworn, even in earlier versions of iOS 26, if you told it not to include location when sending a photo once then it would not include it by default the next time.
Also I thought that when you uploaded a photo from your camera roll to the web I thought it defaulted to no location. And that seems to have changed too. (Of course, you can still tap a button to withhold location EXIF.)
But in the real world, if you put a QR code at the trailhead and said "take a picture of this code. When you see a tortoise nest, use the code to go to our website and share your exact location."
If people are wary of sharing their location with the conservation agency, you might have better luck if the website was run by a nongovernmental conservation group?
I wanted us to do this so badly; inter-agency coordination was the biggest issue with I had with large-scale projects. The funny part about your comment is that each feature you listed was a function that a different agency or contractor handled. I won't name names, but the agency I worked for had better-than-expected public outreach and engagement and were organizationally flexible enough to get low-footprint, high-impact conservation PR like this out the door and in front of people in time to make a difference. But in state government, the idea of several agencies pooling resources for a permanent app store project is totally pie-in-the-sky thinking largely because nobody has the bandwidth to contribute. I'm trying to imagine submitting a PR to 'The State Parks App' org board to get this form shipped and in every instance, I'm getting yelled at.
> If people are wary of sharing their location with the conservation agency, you might have better luck if the website was run by a nongovernmental conservation group?
Our NGO partners were incredible for this sort of thing. People legitimately do not think twice about pinging a facebook group run by, say, the local aquarium and including their location, a description of the site, and photos of what they found. Social media removes a lot of metadata from uploads - they probably keep it someplace and I just can't get at it without a brokerage, idk - but it still gets better results than we did. One fix for the tortoise problem was to supply personal trail maps and golf pencils at trail heads. Hikers were encouraged to take them, mark on the map where they saw burrows along the trail, and put them in a box at the end of the trail/parking lot/ranger station. Park rangers would scan in the maps and upload the scans to our internal site and we would work it out from there.
What made the data junk? Were the provided coordinates not precise enough, incorrect, something else?
Cool article btw!
I for one am glad that that's the trained reaction of the masses
If you're filling out a form with the express purpose of letting someone know specifically where something is... a request for location information is reasonable, duh. And I won't accept the "people are busy and don't have the time and energy to think this through" excuse. If you're taking the time to fill out this form, then yes, you have the time -- seconds, at most -- to think this through in this particular case.
Yeah no kidding the vulnerable animal population is in the park, that's where all their threats are removed. But sometimes "the park" is 60,000 acres and it would be nice if you could help narrow it down.
You have been paying attention to what’s going on haven’t you?
By framing the problem as being with untrustworthy government agencies rather than with greedy data brokers selling data everywhere, you are part of the problem. You may distrust your government as much as you'd like, but before we solve the problems with private data brokers, we can never improve the situation.
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.
I sometimes do that for random pictures, even like selfies, which I don't mind popping up there.
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).
https://www.localguidesconnect.com/t/e-mail-from-google-cong...
Thanks for the insight!
What exactly does that mean though? Is there any benefits to it? All I see is a badge/label, that's it?
https://grapheneos.org/features#network-location
Their approach encompasses GNSS location, too. Nothing Google required.
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?
Seems like this is possibly related to the ACCESS_MEDIA_LOCATION permission[1], and Google's recent efforts to force applications to migrate to the scoped storage API. See: https://developer.android.com/training/data-storage/shared/m...
Probably someone more versed in Android's APIs could give a better explanation.
[1]: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/Manifest.per...
If your app targets Android 10 (API level 29) or higher and needs to retrieve unredacted EXIF metadata from photos, you need to declare the ACCESS_MEDIA_LOCATION permission in your app's manifest, then request this permission at runtime.
So if the app-developer didn't take explicit effort to request this data (and the user-permission for it), his app will not receive it.
[0] https://developer.android.com/training/data-storage/shared/m...
Can you compress a folder with a photo it and then email that? Just curious.
If the app that creates the compressed file uses the media API to get the file and doesn't have the permission to get location-info, the data will be stripped before the OS is handing the file over to that app. This is likely different if the app uses the READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission and API's to read the files though, which is a legacy permission that was mainly kept for file managers now...
If your app targets Android 10 (API level 29) or higher and needs to retrieve unredacted EXIF metadata from photos, you need to declare the ACCESS_MEDIA_LOCATION permission in your app's manifest, then request this permission at runtime.
Source: https://developer.android.com/training/data-storage/shared/m...
Phones are computers though, it’s not up to Google or Apple to decide what’s a good use case for my own pictures.
That's not a good position to be in; this duopoly we've allowed to prosper needs to go.
The whole reason I and my entire family have iPhones is because there are entire classes of scams and scum that you don't have to be constantly vigilant against. If it didn't do that, I wouldn't buy them.
https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/am9mzq/its_neat_...
(and why do they have to strip almost ALL EXIF data, instead of just location? [yes, yes, fingerprinting, but there are LOTS of iPhone {NUMBER} whatever out there])
It really just needs to be clearly communicated, opt-in at attach time. Probably with a severely hidden, developer-screen level, or BIG WARNING in security settings to totally disable stripping.
I assume most people won't want it, _usually_, so when adding photos just have it be a double-opt in - you have to both hit an extra button during attachment, then select "include location" or "include location and metadata", then a modal warning/confirmation.
Something like: "Confirm including photo location? This will permit the recipient to see where the pictures were taken. <yes/no>"
After seeing this post I checked my recent photos. I'm using a Pixel 6 Pro with the most recent android release and the stock camera app. None of my recent photos have location in the EXIF, even locally, and there's no option to turn it on.
It's particularly galling that the Camera app still wants location permissions and if you view a photo in the Google Photos app, the location is still there. Google can have those exact locations, but no one, not even the user, can.
It's abusive as hell.
You don't have this option?
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.
Chrome doesn't seem to request that permission, so the OS doesn't provide the location-data to the app.
If your app targets Android 10 (API level 29) or higher and needs to retrieve unredacted EXIF metadata from photos, you need to declare the ACCESS_MEDIA_LOCATION permission in your app's manifest, then request this permission at runtime.
Source: https://developer.android.com/training/data-storage/shared/m...
No. Upload file means upload file. If you want to mutate the file, mutate the file.
When tools assume you're stupid and insert silent surprises unrelated to the task they no longer deserve the title "tool" because they are fundamentally doing other things.
Turn on car doesn't mean hijack Bluetooth connection.
Let me phrase this another way: "Computer, I told you to transfer file, not strip meta data".
About Linux: it won the Unix war, the cloud computing war, the embedded war, and is the most installed OS on the planet.
As far as the BT car issue. I don’t have that issue. I turned off wireless CarPlay, don’t use BT and I connect my phone to my car using a regular old USB C cable to avoid that issue - and it’s more reliable
The problem shouldn't exist. The object should do what we instruct, and not have its own opinions of us and do stuff on our behalf presuming incompetency
Let's take another example, the 4chan-ification of the web making everything ephemeral. All the feed based sites basically hide what you just saw forever. They've fundamentally broken the web and made all content disposable.
It's no longer an addressable public record. It breaks the fundamental storage and organization principles of why computers exist and the fundamental purposes of why they're networked together, as a shared communal record.
Seeing this working well goes back to original online spaces like this in the 1970s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Memory
Or my favorite quote about this
> It was like an interactive bulletin board. This wasn’t a machine behind a locked door calling shots, quantifying your inadequacies… No! You could touch it. It was a radical reversal. We all knew who the computer was. But, this time, it had no idea who we were.” “Sounds like chaos!” Thomas responds.
> “No! It was anything but!” Orion snaps back protectively, “I could sit at the keyboard and it would say”hello human”. A black woman could sit down and it would say “hello human”. Henry Kissinger could. It would say “hello human” and not for any redemption on his part.
> It’s because the computer was taught how to help but nobody had fed it Instruction on how to hate. It was then I first saw the computer as a place. A place of hope: an apotheosis of everything I fight for and every thing I want the world to be.”
Instead we've broken this and made things aggressively caustic to the human spirit and it shows. Social media is a poison because it's designed poisonously.
This is a deep and systemic problem. You didn't have to see it
It's there but you don't have to see it
Ah yes, the good old, "I don't have that particular issue, so I can use my experience to dismiss your concern".
You do realize that sometimes bugs only affect a small percentage of users, right? And even if it affects, say 40% of users, you may personally never see the issue. Does that make it not worth talking about?
The same with the EXIF data being shared. Most people don’t want their location being shared with photos and there have been reports of stalkers using the information
I have not seen an ad in years.