Metadata from your photos

Back in 2023, Harley Turan extracted EXIF metadata from the photos he took with his phone over the past 14 years, did some experimental analysis and now makes us realise how much it reveals about out lives, even without looking at the actual photos.

Any app that can access your photo library can, with enough effort, determine your address, where you shop, where your friends live, where you go on holiday, where you work, and when you go to bed. This is without looking at anything within the images themselves.

You’ll be pleased/saddened by the lack of AI in this piece.

If AI is powered by big data, then your photo library’s metadata is really the biggest data you own, and you’ve been collecting it with every photo you take.

Via @nhoizey