Be careful about posting your phone camera images publicly if you’re protective of your privacy. Some social media trim location and other sensitive EXIF tags, but it’s best to not trust them.
100% which is why, as mentioned in the article, iOS trims the EXIF data when uploading images to the web.
What was most alarming to me, (I’m not sure why it was a surprise) was that all this rich EXIF data is available to any app that I grant full access to my photo gallery.
Presumably a place like Meta saves all of EXIF data for themselves and serves the end users sanitized ones. I bet you could still fingerprint an image and know what actual camera it came from based on imperfections in the optical sensor, though.
I remember a body positivity blog let contributors provide nude photos, often mobile. To show how normal bodies look like. The engineer in me wondered “wait, what if…” so I used an online EXIF viewer and yep, it wasn’t stripped. A map pin right on their house! :o That was the worst mistake I’ve seen with these yet.
Comments
Be careful about posting your phone camera images publicly if you’re protective of your privacy. Some social media trim location and other sensitive EXIF tags, but it’s best to not trust them.
100% which is why, as mentioned in the article, iOS trims the EXIF data when uploading images to the web.
What was most alarming to me, (I’m not sure why it was a surprise) was that all this rich EXIF data is available to any app that I grant full access to my photo gallery.
Presumably a place like Meta saves all of EXIF data for themselves and serves the end users sanitized ones. I bet you could still fingerprint an image and know what actual camera it came from based on imperfections in the optical sensor, though.
Yep, that's why I wrote a tool to cut all metadata from photos
https://cutexif.com/
Which I use before uploading photos to pubic services.
Exif has surprising amount of infomration
I recently learned Windows has this functionality built-in. Right-click > Properties > Details > Remove Properties and Personal Information.
It's saved me from digging out a purpose-specific tool a couple times.
I remember a body positivity blog let contributors provide nude photos, often mobile. To show how normal bodies look like. The engineer in me wondered “wait, what if…” so I used an online EXIF viewer and yep, it wasn’t stripped. A map pin right on their house! :o That was the worst mistake I’ve seen with these yet.
I have created a tool called ExifPurge to remove EXIF data from multiple photos in one go.
https://www.exifpurge.com
No GNU/Linux build?