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Comment by fletchowns | Hacker News Reader

It's so annoying that Google strips the geolocation data. What would be the reason for this? It has been frustrating following along with the ticket that goes nowhere for years: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/80379228

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As andybak says, almost certainly privacy. It's very easy for an unsophisticated user to share photos that, for example, effectively show where they live (or where someone else lives). I believe Facebook strips geo data as well. (A service like Flickr does not although I assume there is a switch somewhere that tells it to.)

Wouldn't it be easy for Google to only strip the geolocation data if you are not the owner of the photo though?

One scenario is you're at a party at someone's house. If you post a captioned photo from the party that's geotagged, you're identifying where they live.

Vice gave away John Mcaffe's location when he was wanted. with geo data not stripped. from a photo shared by Vice Editor in the blogpost... LOL

Well it's being done through the API, which is presumably OAuth'd under your name, but again, this API is generally used by other sites to interact with your photos library, and it's very easy for someone to just approve the OAuth permissions for sharing photos, not realizing they are also implicitly sharing their location.

Doesn't it also save some space?

I mean, it's a small amount, but on the scale of google it might be worth it.

Privacy?

Ironic as it sounds - privacy?

Ironic indeed. I can’t help but wonder if Google stores the geolocation data privately where only they can access it for their own data mining uses before removing it from the photos.

I would start with the assumption that Google is collecting and storing every single possible data point about every single thing you share with them, including this. I have zero doubt that they store this info privately for their own use.

Zero doubt? Wow, wish I had such confidence to make claims about things I know little about.

Each photo's geolocation data is stored. Of course.

It is shown in the UI, as well as indexed so you can search by location.

For example, I can search for "photos of dogs in Portland" and it'll show all the pics of dogs I've taken in Portland.

You can see the location on Photos website/app, it's not hidden from the user. You also still get it when you Takeout the photos. It's explicitly stripped when sent through the API, because said API is generally used by other websites for getting your photos, and it's not clear to the user they are actually leaking their location when uploading a Photo to "ShareYourRecipe.com".

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