The Dangers of Metadata (And What You Can Do About It)
Today, photos are taken in staggering quantities. In 2022, about 54,400 photos are taken every second, 4.7 billion per day, and 1.72 trillion per year. Of this, over 3.2 billion photos are shared online daily. Today's devices make it easy to snap a picture and upload it to the Internet in the fastest ways. But it's not just pictures you're sending- you might be leaking important information with your photos- metadata. Apple's High Efficiency Image Format (HEIF) for their pictures not only halves the storage space needed by a JPEG image- it also can hold EXIF metadata.
Metadata isn't bad by itself. It can even make your user experience more enjoyable, as you can check the time, date, and even location where the photo was taken, view the photo's resolution, file size, and focal length, all of which can be useful. To check it, simply click the Info button (a circle with an 'i' in the middle) to view the embedded metadata. Metadata allows your photo to be sorted into albums automatically, compiled into Memories on iPhone, or makes it easier to find a certain image. However, the data is bundled with the file, meaning that wherever the (unstripped) image file goes- the EXIF metadata goes.
When sending photos online, this metadata often tags along, and may be able to be seen by people with malicious intent. Generally, social media apps will often strip some or all of the metadata from the photo in the interest of privacy, which is good for unwary users who don't know about it. However, certain image-sharing sites don't- and will even display it online for you without you downloading and checking it yourself, like found here (take a look under the photo, to the left- everything from device to location is displayed). iMessage and other messaging platforms don't strip metadata, as it's often desirable to have this extra data when sharing photos. Even if you trust the recipient, you don't know what the file could be used for after that. It's best, then, to strip any metadata when putting images online, unless it's explicitly needed.
If you hate the idea of having your location bundled with each photo, you can certainly turn it off. On iPhone, simply open Settings > Privacy > Location Services > Camera and select Never, which will cause photos to stop geotagging your photos. However, it doesn't remove existing location metadata- and what if you want to remember where a photo was taken? Additionally, there's no option to remove metadata like time and date- what if you want that gone too? There are various third-party apps that strip metadata for you, but there's no need to trust a company who may harvest this data.
Instead, I've put together a Shortcut to strip metadata from your images easily. It allows you to either take a photo or select photos to be stripped, then remove it and share or save the resultant image quickly and easily. Below, you can see a comparison of the metadata view for an image before and after. Image Metadata Remover - Shortcuts
The next time you send an image, you may want to think about what comes along for the ride!
