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Comment by baddox | Hacker News Reader

What a silly thing to feign being outraged about. If you don't want Path to have access to your photos, then do not explicitly give it access to your photos. If you give the Camera app access to Location Services, then EXIF data is as much a part of your photos as aspect ratio, resolution, and the content of your photo. This is no different than if you gave Twitter access to Location Services, then gave Path access to your Twitter account, and then were supposedly outraged at Path being able to read the location of your tweets.

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Since most of the users of things like iPhones, Path, Twitter, etc. are non-technical users, most will not be aware of things like EXIF data.

They are relying on reputable companies to be good stewards of their data, and infer their intent from their actions. I would expect Twitter, Facebook, Apple, and even Path to know that unless the user has enabled geotagging, they don't want their location leaked via EXIF.

That some of these companies do not do that is not surprising, but it is disappointing.

> They are relying on reputable companies to be good stewards of their data, and infer their intent from their actions.

Perhaps, but without a proper study of their users (and potential future users), how can they infer their intent, and why should they assume that all or even most users will have the same intent? It's certainly conceivable that a user might deny Path access to Location Services (for example, to prevent the automatic location updates due to annoyance rather than personal privacy concerns, or even to save battery life), while still having no problem with including location information from explicitly posted photos.

Honestly, I think any attempts at preempting all supposed outrage like this are futile. You're always going to have someone who will complain about something in your app that works differently than they expected or intended. If Path did ignore geotagged photos, they might have someone just as outraged as this author, but for the opposite reason.

The argument that Apple should be more clear is more valid, since for them there is little downside to being as explicit as possible. This is the same position I took in the Great Address Book Debate. I don't think app developers have a responsibility to second guess the options provided by their platform (especially when their platform is as huge as iOS). In fact, I don't even think it's wise in general.

This might be true about most other features of most apps, however your location is actually fairly sensitive information for LOTS of people, and I think you're underestimating that.

The outrage of a user who disabled location services, but wanted their location uploaded is NOTHING compared to the implications of sharing someone's location without permission. We are talking about life-and-death, in some rare cases (e.g. http://www.petapixel.com/2012/12/03/exif-data-may-have-revea...).

> Perhaps, but without a proper study of their users (and potential future users), how can they infer their intent,

In this case, they don't need to infer my intent. My intent is clear: I have not gone into the app settings and configured it differently. I disabled location services at the OS level for the entire application.

My intent could not be more clear.

Maybe you are afraid Path is using location services in the background or have some other reason to fear that Path is improperly requesting your current location. This does NOT imply that you don't want Path to have EXIF location data from photos you provide it.

A much better option would simply be to provide a simple interface to allow users to exclude this information each time they post a photo and/or in the application settings.

The only clear intent that can be gathered from turning off Location Services is that you do not want Path to access your phone's location sensors. This is pretty explicit in iOS Settings. It is not at all clear that you do not intend for Path to use other sources of location information that you explicitly choose to share, like photos or status updates.

> It is not at all clear that you do not intend for Path to use other sources of location information that you explicitly choose to share, like photos or status updates.

You're right, it's not clear. So, it should explicitly ask when you do so.

(I don't use Path so I don't know if it in fact asks this or at least makes clear that it will be sharing your photo locations before doing so. The article implies it does not.)

It's not feigning - I did not wish to provide Path (or my Path contacts) with my current location. Yet, Path published my location without my consent (after I had turned off location services for the application).

There is nothing that suggests that granting applications access to the content of your photos also grants them access to your current location.

You are not granting them access to your current location...you are granting them access to the photo's location.

Facebook and Twitter also makes available the location of your photos. Is there a particular reason you are singling out Path? I hope it's not a stretch to assume this is a page view grabbing technique.

I don't use Facebook because of their privacy track record, and I have all geolocation disabled for Twitter.

Twitter respects the geolocation setting, and strips the exif location data from photos when serving them. Whether or not they do this before upload is unknown, but pictures posted to Twitter from the iOS app do not include location data when geotagging of tweets is disabled.

The reason I'm not picking on them is because neither of them (Twitter due to Doing The Right Thing, Facebook due to lack of opportunity) have published my private data in express violation of my wishes. Path did so today.

The fact that you have Location Services enabled for the Camera app suggests that granting applications access to your photos grants them access to the location information in those photos. Note that it's not necessarily your current location, or at least I'm assuming it is only using the geotags of the specific photo you're posting.

Actually, I am wrong. As was pointed out to me in a blog comment, three screens in on Settings.app, in Settings->Privacy->Photos, there is a warning in grey text that says that photos contain location information of where they were taken.

Regardless, despite missing this warning, I'm a technical user and know about EXIF data. The real issue is Path ignoring my explicit demand that it not track my location.

>This is no different than if you gave Twitter access to Location Services, then gave Path access to your Twitter account, and then were supposedly outraged at Path being able to read the location of your tweets.

That's a pretty bad analogy.

To expand, a tweet will show the location right next to the text if that's data it contains. Its pretty clear that the information is there. On the other hand, I guarantee the average iPhone owner doesn't know that a picture contains your location.

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