I have asked Apple if they have plans to address this-given their privacy-first mantra, it remains surprising that this issue has slipped their net. Mysk tested the iMessage issue with the latest iOS 14 beta and told me “there doesn’t seem to be any change.”
And so the advice is straightforward-if you send photos to friends or colleagues, assuming you don’t mind that they’re compressed, use WhatsApp or Signal. If you send a photo that’s repeatedly forwarded and shared, your data goes each time. Once you lose control of EXIF data, those photos can be forwarded again and again indefinitely. This issue doesn’t just hit recently taken photos sent to your friends. Many of my friends actually use this method for sharing photos in iMessages.” In other words, the user picks a photo and sends it to a contact without knowing that the photo has location information in its EXIF properties. It also doesn’t provide an option to remove location info from the photo. This method does not show any warning if a photo has location info in it. This has to be done every time the user shares a photo.”Īs for the option to share photos directly from iMessage, Mysk warned that “the user gets a minimalistic view of their photos. If the user switches it off and shares a photo and then tries to share another photo, the user must tap on options and perform the tedious task of toggling that switch off again. But, absent that, such private information should be stripped out, erring on the side of caution.Īccording to Tommy Mysk, one of the researchers who discovered the iOS clipboard issue that so plagued TikTok, the problem with using the iOS photo app share tool to exclude location data is that “the change is not persisted-the location toggle is always switched on by default. And you can share GPS and other data where you need to. Images are not automatically compressed, so you can send the original format. But there are actually major advantages in sending photos over iMessage. It’s simple to just opt for WhatsApp instead-end-to-end encrypted and all metadata stripped by default. There should be a blanket override for stripping EXIF within iMessage or an option each time you send. This confusing mix and match for sharing location data embedded within iMessage photo attachments needs to be addressed.
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