Twitter is reportedly on the look to remove precise geotag location feature to tag the place and area in the photos uploaded at the social media platform. As per the report, many users have stopped using it, to either stay anonymous or be well-aware not to share their location to strangers.
Earlier this year on May 13, Twitter shared a press release stating that it reportedly got a security breach of users geo-tag locations. Many users since that stopped to add their precise location on the photos uploaded or tweet made to stay more anonymous.
The company mentions that it was “accidentally” and when they found out that this was happening, they tried to eliminate the data that was sent to the “trusted partner“, but they were not successful. What they did achieve, they say, is to generalize the information, that is, the data did not show the precise location, but only the city over a radius of 5 square km.
To give us more complete control over what we share and what we do not, we can turn to services like GeoTag Security. This consists of software that massively and automatically removes geo-tags from our photos. We simply have to run the application, indicate the folder that contains the images, and GeoTag Security will do the rest of the work for us, giving us back the same photos but without the location coordinates.
Personally, I think that to stop using geo-labels completely in photos just because there is a remote possibility that this information is badly occupied is somewhat exaggerated. This type of metadata also brings us benefits, such as allowing us to organize a collection of photos depending on where they were taken or allow users of networks such as Flickr to know the physical location to which an image corresponds.
Anyway, it never hurts to have the option of not using geo-tags this function, either because it bothers us, or for any other reason. As always, the final decision is in our hands. Although Twitter is removing location tagging in tweets. In fact, it is only removing the ability to share precise location details like latitude and longitude.
