[madeofpalk]

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.

[Barbing]

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.

[rickdeckard]

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...