It's not great for revenue, it is their revenue.

People act like Google products are a charity that had been free forever, and then this mega-corp called Google came along and started harvesting the data of innocent people who just want to get directions to Starbucks.

GrapheneOS still does this -- allows controlling internet access on a per-app basis.

You can lock down their usage. Limit it to three months storage and minimize sharing. They still report an old address for home and work for me since I dialed up the restrictions years ago. They have the data but it is less exposed.

maps.google.com now redirects to google.com/maps and has done for the past few years.

I don't know when Google's EXIF protections are supposed to kick in, but so far my photos auto-synced to Nextcloud still contain location information as expected.

I don't think this has anything to do with Google Photos. People fall victim to doxxing or stalking or even location history tracking by third party apps all the time because they don't realize their pictures contain location information. It's extra confusion to laypeople now that many apps (such as Discord) will strip EXIF data but others (websites, some chat apps) don't.

This is honestly a horrible argument. Any app on Android can still get EXIF data

So we should educate people about it. Don't you think that constantly coddling people about tech just breeds tech-illiterate people?

Wouldn't it be better if people were more tech-literate?

Coddling only works when those who are in charge of the tech play nice. But then breeds people who will more easily fall victim to the bad actors.

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.

Not for most phones, fortunately.

True, but isn't it irrational to continue operating something you know could cause harm to you when used wrongly, despite not knowing how to use it correctly?