Photographs have carried hidden text for years. Camera model, shutter speed, aperture, the date and time down to the second. It sits in a header alongside the image, nobody looks at it, and it has never mattered much.
Now that phones with satellite receivers are taking a large share of photographs, that header increasingly contains coordinates accurate to a few metres.
The useful version is obvious and I do not want to be sour about it. Holiday photographs arrange themselves on a map. You can find the restaurant from three years ago. Sorting a decade of images by where rather than when turns out to be a genuinely better way to look through them, and it requires no effort from the person taking the pictures.
Requiring no effort is also the problem, because it means no decision, and no decision means no awareness.
Consider what most photographs are of. They are of home. The children, the garden, the kitchen, the cat on a chair. Take those on a phone with location recording switched on, which is frequently the default, and upload them to a sharing site, and you have published your address, repeatedly, with timestamps, to anyone who cares to read a field that most people do not know exists.
Not approximately. Not the town. The house.
What makes this different from the ordinary privacy complaint is that nobody made a choice they could later regret. The setting was on when the phone arrived. The upload tool preserved the header because stripping data would be presumptuous. Every step was a reasonable default chosen by someone thinking about their own component, and the aggregate is a person broadcasting where they sleep.
Back in May I described location awareness as the capability that would quietly reorganise how phones are used. This is the first case I have seen where it reorganises something without anyone noticing it happened.
The fix is unglamorous and belongs to the sharing sites rather than the cameras. Strip the coordinates on upload unless the person asks for them to be kept. That inverts the default from publish-unless-prevented to withhold-unless-requested, which is the correct direction for information this specific, and it costs one decision by one product manager.