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Comment by morissette | Hacker News Reader

Seems like such a shitty thing to victimize the potential victim. But… if you didn’t know that images you took had metadata… maybe you shouldn’t be allowed to use a computer. I mean. I’m going on decades of knowing this. Feel like there is a mid 90s X-Files episode that even like breaks this down. If not NCIS or some shit.

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Even people who know it, don't think about it and don't connect it with the potential consequences of uploading a picture to a website. And why would they? It's not visible, there's no warning, it's just not something that's going to be top of mind.

So we should educate people about it. Don't you think that constantly coddling people about tech just breeds tech-illiterate people?

Wouldn't it be better if people were more tech-literate?

Coddling only works when those who are in charge of the tech play nice. But then breeds people who will more easily fall victim to the bad actors.

I said that people who already know don't think about it. That's not something you can solve by educating them more. When I'm sharing a photo, I am going to think about what I can see in the photo as a data risk, not the invisible stuff that I might intellectually have heard about. It's just not going to come to mind.

People who know about phishing get got by phishing attacks, too. How well has however many years of "cyber awareness training" gone?

Agree. That's also the dilemma with asking the user for his permission, it is very difficult to frame a concise question and get an educated decision there. So, better to only ask if the App explicitly requests that permission sounds reasonable.

The prior threat-model was, that e.g. a camera/gallery app which may/may not have a permission to a users current location, also has access to the history of a users' locations just by scanning the images when showing the camera roll.

It frankly makes sense to create a separate permission just for this location metadata AND strip this data when no permission was granted, I believe everything else would be MUCH harder to explain the user...

I assume Google are very hesitant to add additional permissions, and any additions get very carefully thought about. Having too many prompts can lead to popup blindness, which defeats the entire purposr of the permission system in the first place.

I'm sure I recall much older Android versions presenting all of the app's permissions at install-time. I'm very willing to bet that most users didn't actually read any of it. Overall, it seems like a very interesting problem to solve.

You're right - this is a shitty view on this. It's incredibly opaque that images secretly contain the GPS coordinates of where they were taken. There's no way that's obvious or intuitive.

I think the 'ideal' thing to do would be an opt-in toggle for sharing "location and other extended info" for photos when selecting them, but I'm sure you can understand why a dev team took a shortcut to solve the immediate pain for most users most of the time.

When you upload the photo, at risk of great confusion they could essentially watermark the photo or add a banner showing the location and perhaps some of the other key details, like camera model, right on the photo so it would at least get across to the user that there is an association between these two things that needs to be disabled.

To dismiss the banner you'd have to click a dismiss button which would ask you to confirm that you want to get rid of the location data completely. Then there would be a tiny little button that says “hide this location inside the photo, where I can't see it easily, but everyone totally could”. (But less stupid.)

It would be terrible because there would be huge support threads on why it's trying to share an image with an overlay, but it would get it across. Would be a different failure mode for user privacy than what you would have with a text prompt or an interstitial or whatever.

Sounds fun, but in this case it's actually the OS which is stripping the meta-data before fulfilling the file-access request to the app.

Now an app maybe just wants to set the image as wallpaper, send it to a printer or set as an avatar, so it requests to read it from storage. The OS injecting a watermark here or adding some UI would break decades of apps...

100% of the people that don't know that HN exists, most likely don't know images have metadata.

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