My family has been taking lots of photos recently. That's a good thing. But I wanted to learn how certain sites, especially Facebook, handle privacy of photos marked with location. I'm all for sharing location for lots of places, but not our family and friends' houses or our place. Do sites allow me to control this?
First, a little background.
Whether location is stored, and how accurate it is, depend on a few factors. The camera does not necessarily need GPS to know its location. There are other technologies for approximating location, such as ip location, wifi location, and mobile phone tracking. Depending on the hardware involved and environmental conditions, such as the weather for GPS, the recorded location can be fairly precise.
My experiment was fairly simple. I started with a vacation photo from last summer. The camera we used did not record the location, so I added it on my computer using Microsoft's Pro Photo Tools. The tool allowed me to put a marker on a map, in Dillon, Colorado, and save the photo back to my computer with the location embedded.
I then uploaded the photo to three web sites to see if the location in the photo would automatically be shared with anyone who viewed, or downloaded, the photo.
Here are my results.
- Flickr - The Flickr site did exactly what I'd hoped. By default, the location of the photo was not available to others. When I clicked the optional "Add this photo to your map" option, Flickr displayed the message "Your camera has suggested that your photo was taken in this location". Kudos to Flickr for this message, and the word "suggested" since there's no guaranteed accuracy. Flickr then gave me the option to keep location private or share it. And within my account privacy settings, Flickr gives the option to automatically import location data (off by default) for new photos. This would be handy if I didn't want to go through the privacy step for each photo. Anyway, to verify Flickr kept location private, I viewed the photo as if another user would (not logged in), saved it to my computer, and inspected it with Pro Photo Tools. As expected, Flickr removed the location from the file for download.
- Panaramio - Panaramio did the complete opposite of Flickr. The location of my photo was instantly available to anyone I shared the photo with. There was no option I could find to make location private, remove it completely, or to change the location privacy in my account settings. There is a feature to enable photo location with Google Latitude (off by default), but that didn't protect the upload I did today. I suppose the only saving grace is that Panaramio showed a map right next to the photo with the photo location, so if I was paying attention I'd see that location was detected.
- Facebook - Facebook did something odd that left me a little uncomfortable. It never asked if I wanted to keep location private or share it. It didn't display a map or location name. It didn't seem to recognize the location at all. And when I downloaded the photo, the location wasn't part of the file. So what made me uneasy? I couldn't find anything in Facebook help or privacy settings about location at all. Nothing that said location is automatically removed and not stored anywhere on Facebook computers. And nothing that said if Facebook some day decides to add a photo location feature, that they will only share my photo locations if I explicitly allow it. If these things are written somewhere, I'd love to see them. Until then, I'll be sure to remove sensitive locations before I upload to Facebook, and remind my family and friends to do the same.
So, top scores to Flickr. With 148 million publically-geotagged photos, and presumably many more with private location, it's good to know they're on their game when it comes to privacy and user control.
