Note: 27

By default, your phone encodes your GPS location into any photos you take inside of the image’s EXIF metadata.

If you then share that image (on Mastodon for example), people will be able to tell where you were when you took that photo.

You can use websites like https://everestpipkin.github.io/image-scrubber/ to read and erase an image’s data – ctrl+f for “GPS” to see if your photo is storing it.

Here’s a set of example metadata:

On Android, you can prevent your phone’s Camera app from recording this information by going into the settings and turning off the “Save location” toggle.

Take control of your data! :)