[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.