So, is Facebook doing anything valuable with the data? Not for you. Location Data Harvested From Photo Facebook As you can imagine, this is not the kind of privacy I had in mind. If I type those lat/long co-ordinates into Google Maps, I get an exact match to my location, and Google’s Street View shows me the front of my house. In the case of this specific photo, the one just uploaded from my iPhone, that data includes a very precise location and my “upload IP address.” Facebook doesn’t need any more than that. If you select “photos and videos,” you will see the data that Facebook saved from the images you uploaded. If you go to your Facebook privacy settings and select “your Facebook information,” you can download a copy of the data it holds. That has been replaced with Facebook’s own codes.Īnd so, you might assume that Facebook has deleted this data. You can see this, because if you save a photo from Instagram or your Facebook albums onto your phone, there will be no location information. I can use the share function in Apple Photos to strip location data as I send, and most messengers strip this data, but in Facebook’s app, when I upload a photo, the data is sent as well.įacebook and Instagram do in fact strip the metadata, the so-called EXIF information, from photos that are saved to their platforms. My iPhone adds GPS tags to photos-useful to sort and find images. But Facebook still collects the location tag from that photo, along with my IP address.įacebook App and Website - Location Access Disabled Facebook I used Facebook’s app on my iPhone, the same app that has been told “never” to access my location, the same account that knows I have this switched off. I took a photo with my iPhone and then uploaded that to my Facebook account. And here we can see exactly how it’s the letter and not the spirit of the rules that seems to apply.ĭespite me telling my iPhone “never” to allow Facebook access to my location, despite me checking Facebook online to confirm it knows “location history for mobile devices” is set to “off.” Facebook continues to exploit a loophole, harvesting photo location tags and IP addresses, all of which it will, in its own words, “collect and process.” The last major privacy innovation was to restrict location tracking. And so we’ll need to wait and see what workarounds the data giants find to keep tracking our web and app activity. IOS 14.5 is also fairly new-the impact is still being assessed.
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