What Information Is Stored In A Picture Uploaded To Facebook

Fifty-fifty many people who are troubled by Facebook's privacy abuses feel they tin't avoid using Facebook's iPhone app to stay in bear upon with their family, friends, and communities. If that's you, first make certain you've turned off Permit Apps to Asking to Track in Settings > Privacy > Tracking (see "Apple Releases iOS xiv.5, iPadOS xiv.5, macOS eleven.iii, watchOS vii.four, and tvOS 14.five," 26 April 2021). Also, be certain to set Settings > Privacy > Location Services > Facebook to Never to keep Facebook from tracking your location. Facebook can't runway your location anymore, correct? Well, not quite.

Zak Doffman, writing for Forbes, discovered that Facebook extracts location data from any photos you upload. It does this past snagging the EXIF data embedded in any photo you have with your iPhone, which includes location, engagement and time, and camera settings. In normal usage, the Photos app uses that location information to display a map of where you took all your photos.

Facebook extracts your photos' location data in a particularly sneaky way, stripping it out betwixt when yous upload the photo and when it's published on Facebook. That might pb you to believe your privacy is being protected. If yous download a photograph from Facebook, you lot won't discover whatsoever interesting EXIF data, but Facebook silently adds it all to its ain data trove. Facebook confirmed that practice to Doffman.

Instagram, which is owned past Facebook, engages in the aforementioned behavior, and it's probably safe to presume whatever Facebook-owned app does so as well. We wouldn't trust any other ad-supported services that accept photos either.

If you're curious about what sort of information is embedded in your photos, you tin can hands view it on your Mac. To maintain your privacy when sharing photos, we recommend stripping the location information when exporting from Photos on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad, and we've made an iOS shortcut to share photos without metadata. Finally, only to exist safe, you lot can block an app's access to your photograph library in iOS so information technology tin can't possibly exfiltrate data.

View EXIF Data on Your Mac

Before yous learn how to strip EXIF data, it'south helpful to meet for yourself what's there. That requires a tertiary-party app on iOS, just Photos, Preview, and even the Finder on the Mac tin can show you that data just by selecting a photo and pressing Command-I. Y'all'll encounter the most detailed EXIF information in Preview. Be sure to click the "i" tab, and yous can see more EXIF data past clicking General, Exif, and GPS.

Preview EXIF data

Strip EXIF Location Data from Photos on Your Mac

Photos tin can strip EXIF location data automatically when y'all drag a photograph from Photos into the Finder to consign it. This is controlled past a setting in Photos > Preferences called "Include location data for published items." Every bit long as that'south unchecked, Photos will remove the location data during the export procedure.

Photos location export setting

If you instead apply File > Export > Export X Photos, there's a Location Information checkbox that controls whether or not Photos will export GPS location data along with the photos.

Strip EXIF Data from Photos on Your iPhone or iPad

You demand an app to view all the EXIF metadata on an iPhone or iPad, merely you tin can strip location metadata from photos for free. Open up a photograph in Photos, and tap the photo to reveal the share icon. Tap the share icon and so tap Options at the meridian. Turn off Location and tap Done. You can then share or copy your photo to send information technology out into the world without location information.

But it's like shooting fish in a barrel to forget to exercise that every time you want to share a photograph. If you lot desire a technique that is guaranteed to strip the data each time, I've created a shortcut to share photos without location information. Install and open up the shortcut, select your photos, and tap Add in the upper-right corner. Yous can then cull the destination from the share sheet. If you share photos frequently, you could invoke the shortcut via Siri or even customize it to share automatically to your preferred app.

Some apps like Twitter don't play nicely with the share sheet. For them, I copy the prototype from the share sheet and paste it into the app.

Protecting Access to Your Photos in iOS

In its ongoing push to ensure that apps tin admission only data that the user intends them to admission, Apple introduced a privacy characteristic in iOS 14 that lets you control which photos whatever given app can access. It's fiddly to select merely a subset of photos that you may desire to share, and if you're sharing directly from Photos or the shortcut, apps don't demand access to your photos anyway.

To cut off access to photos, get to Settings > Privacy > Photos > App Name and select None. That manner, Facebook and other nosy apps can't admission your photo library at all.

Stripping Location Metadata Should Be the Default

WWDC is merely days away, and we'd like to meet Apple add better control of location metadata to iOS 15 and iPadOS 15. Photos for Mac can already strip this data on export, and iOS and iPadOS can do it on a per-photograph basis. Facebook's behavior shows that this is not plenty.

Apple's next step should exist to add two switches at the tiptop of Settings > Privacy > Photos. The first would globally preclude all apps with access to photos from reading EXIF information, and the 2d would automatically strip location metadata on export, merely like in Photos for the Mac. Apps could request permission to override either setting, and the user could grant such permission on a per-app or per-export ground.