[trompetenaccoun]

For certain types of photography (for example low-light) it's important to remove them if you care about quality, I think software for getting rid of hot pixels came first. All you need is enough suitable shots from the same camera, so it's sort of trivial. Of course this can also be used as a sort of fingerprint, so it's true that if you want to share photos truly anonymously you need to get rid of those pixels in addition to the metadata.