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this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2024
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Technology
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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.
Unless I'm uploading pictures to cloud storage I want GPS data filed off. I'd rather have some unnecessary bug reports targeting the wrong things then stalkers showing up at my door.
Immich is a self-hosted photo hosting service. They're listing this in their docs because people are trying to upload photos with GPS data, hitting this cursed behavior because they didn't give immich Location access (because why would you?), and then filing unnecessary bug reports on them about their disappearing data.
To be clear, no one is against stripping GPS data, that's not what anyone takes issue with, it's the silently part that is unexpected behavior.
I think all apps should have those explanation screens of what's not going to work if you deny X permission and why, especially in the case of an issue like this
It should request location access, and if it's denied tell the user that it won't be able to get the location data from images and give them a button to have it ask permission again
I find it to be a bit sketchy in general, because it means the OS is actually parsing and editing the actual bytes of the file contextually when an app tries to access it. Probably making a shadow copy somewhere without the GPS exif data.
But yeah, I agree, at a minimum the OS should pop up a notification that "By default, GPS data will be stripped from the file due to inadequate location permissions" until the user either changes their preference or says "that's fine, don't remind me for this app". Having it happen silently just isn't good.
You're probably right but it wouldn't be a clean implementation for the os to do it. If it was more universal and better documented app devs could just put notices in themselves
I assume it's part of the security for the app to not even know whether the GPS data was ever there.
The app knows if location permission has been denied though
Yeah that's true. Not always ideal, though. I'd prefer the option to spoof a location to the app, just to avoid dealing with apps that unnecessarily block features when you deny them location permissions.