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luna, friend of eggbug

if i had a nickel for every time i've seen someone's self-hosted blog with unredacted geolocation exif in the images, i'd have three nickels from today alone

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@luna Sometimes I leave them in there so people can know where I took that photo?

I scrub it if I don't want to share the location.

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@bayindirh sorry, perhaps i should rephrase:

if i had a nickel for every time i've seen someone's self-hosted blog with unredacted geolocation exif in the images *exposing their home address*, i'd have three nickels from today alone

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four. i'd have four nickels.

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@luna *starts sweating and looks around for her laptop*

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i'm at a point now where if i'm reading your self-hosted blog and i see a photo that looks like it was taken on a smartphone i immediately get worried

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(and then i check the exif tags and if they're leaking your address i email you)

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@luna I had the same thought a couple of days ago and managed to crank out a quick Mayke post on how to use exiftool to strip GPS location data. With Jelly Babies, because why not... https://martinh.net/hacks/jellybaby-opsec/

Feels like Jekyll and Hugo (the main culprits?) should do this by default. And maybe someone has already submitted PRs - but that's a rabbithole for another day!

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@m interestingly the browser extension I use still alerts that there's GPS data present (even though it's just null island); you could also use exiftool -gps:all= <filename> which removes the fields outright

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@luna Years ago, when I found out EXIF data can contain location info, I immediately disabled any access to Location that any camera app requested. It's so dangerous to just have stuff like this easily accessible online.

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@igimenezblb @luna I did too - but don’t most social media apps strip this information out?

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@dxzdb @igimenezblb yes, but the key word is "most" i.e. "not all"

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@luna Another bad one is in video files, especially iPhone, at least last I checked it was not scrubbed by for example Discord.
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