Photo's Hidden 'Exif' Data Exposes Your Personal Information

[picture*books]

I think eBay expunges a photo's EXIF data prior to posting, however thought some might find this of interest:

Photo's Hidden 'Exif' Data Exposes Your Personal Information

“A seller from Craigslist once emailed Rajewski photos of an item he was thinking of buying—with the Exif data still attached. “I’m like, ‘I now know where you live, but I don’t really want to know where you live,’” Rajewski says. “When I met that person, I kind of educated them, saying, ‘Hey, maybe it’s a privacy concern for you,’ so they can make better decisions moving forward.”

When you store your photos in Google Photos or Apple Photos, the Exif data is preserved. That allows you to search for photos later by date and location. Both services have a feature that lets you share photos without that information attached.

If you post photos online, the details vary by site. Flickr preserves Exif data by default, but users can change their account settings to control whether Exif data is available when others download their photos. The service also has a setting that will strip out location data automatically when photos are uploaded.

Many other sites that let you display photos to friends or the public remove the Exif data before the images are shown to others. If you upload pictures to Craigslist, Facebook, Imgur, Instagram, Twitter, or WhatsApp, the Exif data won’t be available to the people who see them.”

[picture*books]

This is eye-opening, in that even if the EXIF data is expunged, each camera leaves it's own traceable fingerprint:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210324-the-hidden-fingerprint-inside-your-photos

[taylor_memorial]

Thanks.

My camera is pretty old, with no intention of upgrading, and I rarely take, let along share, pictures I take with my phone (which has location data switched off). So I'm not very worried. But it's good to know about the tool.

[shipscript]

Very useful topic.

I can confirm that eBay strips exif data. eBay also strips the rotation flag. That is why photos display correctly in a browser that interprets the rotation flag, but may appear sideways or upside down on eBay.

I prepare all of my photos in free IrfanView and use the "save" option that strips all extraneous data, which makes the file smaller too.