Seems like such a shitty thing to victimize the potential victim. But… if you didn’t know that images you took had metadata… maybe you shouldn’t be allowed to use a computer. I mean. I’m going on decades of knowing this. Feel like there is a mid 90s X-Files episode that even like breaks this down. If not NCIS or some shit.

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roywiggins 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Even people who know it, don't think about it and don't connect it with the potential consequences of uploading a picture to a website. And why would they? It's not visible, there's no warning, it's just not something that's going to be top of mind.

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SirMaster 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	roywiggins 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I said that people who already know don't think about it. That's not something you can solve by educating them more. When I'm sharing a photo, I am going to think about what I can see in the photo as a data risk, not the invisible stuff that I might intellectually have heard about. It's just not going to come to mind. People who know about phishing get got by phishing attacks, too. How well has however many years of "cyber awareness training" gone?

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madeofpalk an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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 35 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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pjmlp 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

100% of the people that don't know that HN exists, most likely don't know images have metadata.