[h0nd]

i use jailbreak to control my location better - i can more easily de/activate it and spoof my location.

Now, I noticed a weird behaviour. I am not sure if its a 'bug' due to jailbreak, or if it shows how apps can access location.

The setup is as follows: location services are completely deactivated system-wide. a spoof location is set.

This means, I am not able in any way to access/share my location, neither the real nor the spoofed one.

However, when someone shares a location with me, upon displaying it on a map, instead of the location shared the spoofed one will be displayed along the correct address of the shared location.

ok, i dont know how iOS manages location services. still it is not nice at all to see that somehow an app can access a location, even if its spoofed and by error.

regarding the article: you can tell your phone not to give fb any location data. but why would you take a picture with location data and upload it to facebook? its so obvious and straight-forward that the user simply undermines his own privacy.

[jeromegv]

It's not obvious. You are uploading a photo to send to a friend, you don't know or expect that where this photo was taken is automatically used by Facebook to target you. Hell, most people wouldn't even know that the EXIF has the location.

[cj]

I remember sending Apple Live photos to friends when "live" photos first came out.

It wasn't 6+ months later that I realized audio was also embedded in live photos. I just never noticed because my phone is always on silent mode.

The realization that I was sending audio clips to friends and family along with photos for months and month was... unnerving.

It's a problem when tech becomes so complex that the average (or in my case, even the above average) tech user can't keep up.

[Natfan]

Slight tangent, but Relay for reddit[0] (an Android reddit client) has fixed this problem, in my opinion.

Whenever a video comes up that could play audio, it is automatically muted and a UI element appears for the user to unmute it. This means that I know if a video has audio along with it, even if my phone is on silent. It has the added bonus of not embarrassing me in public if a loud video comes on.

I'm not sure if this feature is turned on by default, but it's just a neat solution to this problem that I think it should be.

[0]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=free.reddit.ne...

[h0nd]

Imho there is kind of a responsibility to the user to know what he is doing and what his actions do imply.

If you take an image with a GPS enabled camera, yes that information along others can be saved as metadata.

Sure, tech companies try to abstract the functionalities, making it more difficult to see and understand. Still, this can not be an excuse to just do things not unknowingly.

[Nextgrid]

To be fair, this is more of a legal and ethical problem than a technology problem.

Photo geolocation metadata has legitimate uses, the problem isn't that the metadata is there per-se but that it's being used for nefarious purposes without the user's knowledge nor consent.

[b3morales]

Technology could help out here, though. It would be nice for there to also be an explicit switch in device settings allowing the user to choose whether the GPS data should be included when the camera takes a photo. This would be separate from location services being enabled.

[frosted-flakes]

All of my phones have had that setting in the camera app.

[13of40]

> why would you take a picture with location data and upload it to facebook

You could argue that most people don't know the location data is there. But at the same time, if you're doing something you want to keep secret, you probably shouldn't be uploading pictures of it to Facebook anyway.

[369]

I just turned off location services. I turn them back on for the rare times I use gps.