Privacy and Photos

January 4th, 2008 at 09:52am Deen Freelon Permalink

Hi all,

This is a relevant thread from Sam’s DigitalAid site which I am reposting to the blog for posterity. ~DEEN
—Hello there.

Digital
cameras store, in addition to photographs themselves, some metadata
about the photographs. This metadata is often embedded with the image
itself. This can provide interesting data about a photograph. But it
can also be a privacy issue. Here is a post about this issue: http://netzreport.googlepages.com/hidden_data_in_jpeg_files.html

Question for you:

• Should
  we strip this data? (no guarantees that all the data would get
  stripped, but there is a Drupal contributed module that attempts to
  strip this data; this applies only to those photos uploaded to the
  site, not any pulled in from Flickr or other 3rd parties).
• Should
  we print this data along with the photo? (there’s another Drupal module
  that does this so it shouldn’t have much impact on cost/time)
• Should we do what 99% of the world does, which is neither? (don’t print it, don’t strip it)
• Or should we ask the youth what they want us to do?

Lemme know!
-Sam

4 comments so far

Samantha Moscheck Tue, 1 Jan at 12:26 PM

Hi Lance,
I got your email but not because of the reply – to post to the website
project management site you have to click on the link in this mail and
log in. I think there is a way to retrieve a forgotten password but I
can reset if needed.

I could post it to the blog, but the nice thing about the PM site is that
it keeps our email correspondence about the topic threaded and I get
the emails. Does the blog send emails of all comments? Deen?

I wonder, depending how the blog works, if we might use the PM site for
all this stuff and if somebody might, at some point, create blog posts
either copying or referecing the relevant PM messages.

Trying to keep it simple, but also be sure we all get included on the conversation.

Maybe just because of holiday but I didn’t see any response to my blog post about YouTube versus Blip TV - did folks see that?

Thanks!

Vicky Yuki Wed, 2 Jan at 8:32 AM

Thanks
for the information, Sam. I went to the netzreport site and actually,
there is a link at the bottom for a pdf of various examples where you
can actually see the whole image after it had been cropped.

I believe the site needs to be a safe place for youth to express
themselves and am not sure that they will feel as safe knowing that
images they had manipulated and placed on the site can expose what they
don’t want others to see. I also see this as an educational
opportunity, as I didn’t know that this was an issue with larger
implications.

I would like to hear from the Y folks who work directly with kids and whether they have experienced this as a problem.

Thank you!

Chris Tugwell Wed, 2 Jan at 9:21 AM

Thanks for bringing this to our attention, Sam.

Sam,
do you know why most people don’t bother to strip or print the data? Is
it because they are unaware there is metadata stored on the photo?

The link you provided included a couple of real life scenarios where the
embedded metadata created some problems. I would hate to see something
like this happen to any of our users.

What’s the added cost for stripping photos?

Do you have a strong opinion on what we should do?

Samantha Moscheck Wed, 2 Jan at 12:06 PM

I’m sure most people have no idea. I had no idea either, to be honest,
until I stumbled on a Drupal module that attempts to strip some of it
out, and researched the issue a bit.

My personal opinion is that it is a very good thing to educate youth (and parents!) about. And
that actually stripping out the data on the PSO
site would be a good gesture, but not a whole lot more than a gesture
if we presume that youth are out uploading photos other places too.

Plus, I’m wondering about videos – is there any such encoding on videos? Etc. I have no idea.

I think it would be a very interesting project for a student to research
this issue. I bet there are software programs – probably at least one
free program – that you can run photos and videos through to completely
strip all the information before then sending it on to whatever website
or other place you’re sending it. It might be cool to encourage youth
to do that or to at least know how.

In terms of having the PSO site strip the info from JPG
files: There is a module already that makes the attempt to strip most
of the information – it would have to be modified to make it work with
this site, because I’m using a different and better method for image
handling, but i’ll put together a cost estimate. However, I’m
optimistic that we can get it done within our current development
budget.

Naturally it wouldn’t impact video or images from third party sites.

Amazing stuff!

Best,
-Sam

Entry Filed under: PSO website development, legal and privacy