User reported that their current location is appended to image EXIF data by default

[misaochan]

I recently received a complaint where a user believed that their current location was appended to the EXIF of their uploaded image without their consent. After doing a bit of digging to refresh my memory, it seems to me that this should not happen. As mentioned at https://github.com/commons-app/apps-android-commons/wiki/Category-suggestions-%28readme%29 , the user's current location should only be collected and appended to the uploaded image (and used for category suggestions) if the user explicitly enables the setting for that. That is certainly the case for me when I test it.

Does this happen to anyone else?

[whym]

Is it possible it was an image created using a different app with location info on it and then uploaded using this app?

If that is the case, maybe we should somehow detect it and show a warning about it.

[misaochan]

It's hard to find out, as I wasn't given the user's contact or name, I was just contacted by the Wikimedia oversight team. :/ I think that as long as no one else has experienced this problem before, we can safely say that it isn't supposed to happen, and that if it happens again, we would like further details to try and isolate why that particular user is experiencing a problem?

[nemobis]

(Initial content was for another issue)

From the comments above I don't understand: if I took a photo with whatever camera application and I later upload it to Commons with this app, should I expect the location EXIF to be stripped or should I use another application for that? It's easy to test so I'll check later tomorrow if I remember.

[misaochan]

@nemobis In your case the location EXIF won't be stripped. The complaint here was that the user's current location was appended to an image with no EXIF location data, without his permission. This should never happen (and, beyond this one report, never has, AFAIK). There is an option in Settings to use your current location as location data if the image has no EXIF data, but that is off by default and has to be enabled by the user if they want it.