Some of these seem less cursed, and more just security design?
>Some phones will silently strip GPS data from images when apps without location permission try to access them.
That strikes me as the right thing to do?
>Some phones will silently strip GPS data from images when apps without location permission try to access them.
That strikes me as the right thing to do?
And wait. Uh oh. Does this mean my Syncthing-Fork app (which itself would never strike me as needing location services) might have my phone's images' location be stripped before making their way to my backup system?
EDIT: To answer my last question: My images transferred via Syncthing-Fork on a GrapheneOS device to another PC running Fedora Atomic have persisted the GPS data as verified by exiftool. Location permissions have not been granted to Syncthing-Fork.
Happy I didn't lose that data. But it would appear that permission to your photo files may expose your GPS locations regardless of the location permission.
Looking now I can't even find that setting anymore on my current phone. But the photos still does have the GPS data intact.
Yep, and it's there for very goos reasons. However if you don't know about it, it can be quite surprising and challenging to debug.
Also it's annoying when your phones permissions optimiser runs and removes the location permissions from e.g. Google Photos, and you realise a few months later that your photos no longer have their location.
What happens is that when an application without location permissions tries to get photos, the corresponding OS calls strip the geo location data when passing them. The original photos still have it, but the application doesn't, because it doesn't have access to your location.
This was done because most people didn't know that photos contain their location, and people got burned by stalkers and scammers.
Every kind of permission should fail the same way, informing the user about the failure, and asking if the user wants to give the permission, deny the access, or use dummy values. If there's more than one permission needed for an operation, you should be able to deny them all, or use any combination of allowing or using dummy values.
Try to get an iPhone user to send you an original copy of a photo with all metadata. Even if they want to do it most of them don't know how.