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Comment by freebuju | Hacker News Reader

Yeah. This is not particularly a Facebook problem. And it certainly is not an iPhone exclusive one. I would be willing to bet my 2¢ that Apple photo backups store your photos with exif data. Should be trivially easy to strip this info and "track" you as well. Am not seeing anyone crying over this.

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> I would be willing to bet my 2¢ that Apple photo backups store your photos with exif data.

I sure hope so. The EXIF data has to be part of the backups, it's important data.

I love the location data. I couldn’t live without on my iPhone / iCloud. It’s great for pulling up pictures of which you remember the place but not the time for example.

Yeah I do just this all the time, so handy being able to search using natural language for the Exif data too.

> Should be trivially easy [for Apple] to strip this info and "track" you as well.

The issue is that you are telling Facebook to not use your location data for marketing, then they are finding out your location via another method and then using it for marketing (based on a loophole in their privacy agreement).

I'm guessing here, but perhaps that is since apple revenue isn't ad-driven in the same sense Facebook is?

Apple revenue is not ad (or otherwise, location) driven today but that doesn’t mean it won’t be tomorrow.

(Non ad location business: hazard profile based on where you hang out. Frequency of pub visits may impact your life insurance rates)

None can be trusted. Doesn't matter what either party claims to sell/not sell. Google started off with "Do no evil" as a motto at some point in its history.

“Do no evil” is idealism. “Don’t undermine our marketing to grab data assets that don’t align with our business model” is cold self-interest.

I have much more faith in a company staying true to the latter. Not 100% faith, because their assessment of what business model to pursue can change, but it’s certainly not comparable in flakiness to corporate idealism.

Yet.

I mean, if you’re backing your phone up, you’re basically giving them free reign over your life. Of course there’s location data, and there’s every conversation you’ve ever had on there too.

It’s a matter of expectations: You’re handing your data over to Apple for them to back it up; You’re sending photos via Facebook to share it with friends, and location data isn’t shown anywhere.

If you’re backing your phone up to iCloud.

Apple explicitly uses the EXIF data in their Photos app by displaying and organising the photos by location. I do not believe that it’s used for more than user-facing features (and training said features).

It's a feature, not a bug. I *want* my photo saving software to display photos on a map.

In what way is having valuable exif data that I use for tracking hikes and vacations being stored safely in my online backups the same as Facebook scraping that exif data to invade my privacy?

The false equivalencies in this thread are almost overwhelming.

If you use iCloud photos, yes. Anyone with access to all your photos can track you.

That’s why I back up mine to a NAS in my house and have that send encrypted backups off-site.

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