3 ms·
Some of these seem less cursed, and more just security design? >Some phones will silently strip GPS data from images when apps without location permission try
by nemothekid 1y ago
Some of these seem less cursed, and more just security design?
>Some phones will silently strip GPS data from images when apps without location permission try to access them.
That strikes me as the right thing to do?
- gausswho 1y agoHuh. Maybe? I don't want that information available to apps to spy on me. But I do want full file contents available to some of them. And wait. Uh oh. Does this mean my Syncthing-Fork app (which itself would never strike me as needing location services) might have my phone's images' location be stripped before making their way to my backup system? EDIT: To answer my last question: My images transferred via Syncthing-Fork on a GrapheneOS device to another PC running Fedora Atomic have persisted the GPS data as verified by exiftool. Location permissions have not been granted to Syncthing-Fork. Happy I didn't lose that data. But it would appear that permission to your photo files may expose your GPS locations regardless of the location permission.
- krs_ 1y agoWith the Nextcloud app I remember having to enable full file permissions to preserve the GPS data of auto-uploaded photos a couple of years ago. Which I only discovered some months after these security changes went into effect on my phone. That was fun. I think Android 10 or 11 introduced it. Looking now I can't even find that setting anymore on my current phone. But the photos still does have the GPS data intact.
- serial_dev 1y agoI think the “cursed” part (from the developers point of view) is that some phones do that, some don’t, and if you don’t have both kinds available during testing, you might miss something?
- _ZeD_ 1y agoHow does it makes sense?
- monegator 1y agoIt's not if it silently alters the file. i do want GPS data for geolocation, so that when i import the images in the right places they are already placed where they should be on the map
- sofixa 1y ago> That strikes me as the right thing to do Yep, and it's there for very goos reasons. However if you don't know about it, it can be quite surprising and challenging to debug. Also it's annoying when your phones permissions optimiser runs and removes the location permissions from e.g. Google Photos, and you realise a few months later that your photos no longer have their location.
- stronglikedan 1y agoThere is never a good reason to permanently modify my files, if that is what is going on here. Seems like I wouldn't be able to search my photos by location reliably if that data was stripped from them.
- sofixa 1y agoNothing is "permanently modifying your files". What happens is that when an application without location permissions tries to get photos, the corresponding OS calls strip the geo location data when passing them. The original photos still have it, but the application doesn't, because it doesn't have access to your location. This was done because most people didn't know that photos contain their location, and people got burned by stalkers and scammers.
- kevincox 1y agoI think the bad part is that the users are often unaware. Stripping the data by default makes sense but there should be an easy option not to. Try to get an iPhone user to send you an original copy of a photo with all metadata. Even if they want to do it most of them don't know how.
- marcosdumay 1y agoIMO, the problem is that it fails silently. Every kind of permission should fail the same way, informing the user about the failure, and asking if the user wants to give the permission, deny the access, or use dummy values. If there's more than one permission needed for an operation, you should be able to deny them all, or use any combination of allowing or using dummy values.
- account42 1y agoAnd permissions should also not be so wide. You should be able to give permission to the GPS data in pictures you consciously took without giving permission to track your position whenever.