Was browsing through the Immich cursed knowledge library. This is quite interesting.

Flax@feddit.uk to Technology@beehaw.org – 58 points –
14

Is that cursed? Seems like the right privacy-focused default behavior and good design to me

Imo the cursed part is that only some do that and not all.

It's cursed because it happens silently, such that you might accidentally be deleting gps data you wanted to keep without noticing, for a reason that you probably wouldn't think to check, probably instead erroneously filing a bug on the app for doing it.

It's the silently part that is the problem. If you want your personal pictures to be stored on your personal cloud, you're a lot more likely to want location tags attached. If it just told you that it was stripping the tags, then you could disable it for certain apps, Rather than not noticing until you already deleted the original images from the phone.

this is based, as @nincodedo mentioned before it's cursed they don't all do this

So if I download an image from the web with GPS data, and then open it in an app that just reads images (so it doesn't need location permissions)... That app (on some phones) gets a modified version of the file?

Which could make me think that the image doesn't have location information.

Which could result in me uploading that file using a browser (that does have location permission turned on) to a website, and I think it's safe to share because there's no private information in the image, but my phone has conspired to mislead me.

Yes, that is cursed.

I'm also worried that this is why gallery apps would require GPS location just for viewing photos (and their Metadata). Once gallery app has the permission, it can track your location in real time. It's like this should be a separate permission rather than bundled together.

That Javascript date indexing one is almost as cursed as fucking tire sizes.

This included that as well. 1000048717