When we think about technological progress we generally assume things improve over time — they will get smaller, lighter, more efficient, and more precise. That’s true, but when it comes to privacy and the sharing of data, more precision is not always a good thing. Fully understanding the conflict between sharing and accurate data, such as geo coordinates, Canon plans on giving their users a way to obscure the data they record. This will be done using low-precious EXIF data that adds a degrees of fuzziness to both time and location information.
When you take a picture with a modern digital camera, a small amount of metadata is stored in the image file. This EXIF data includes basic information about the camera and the shooting conditions (shot duration, if the flash fired, aperture, etc.). The EXIF can be expanded to include the camera’s owner (the image’s copyright holder), the time and, if the camera has GPS, the coordinates of where the shot was taken. If the camera has a compass on-board it can even tell you the direction the camera was facing when the shot was made.
All this data is great if you are a major Lightroom user or if you want want more information about a certain image, but it can be problematic if you share your images. For example, you might email an image to someone about an item you have on Craigslist. Then, without any warning, a complete stranger knows where you took the shot, what time you took it, and how expensive your camera is. The same is true, in an amplified version, with images posted to social networks.
The issue of sharing too much data has only started to be noticed with cameras, but it’s much more prevalent with smartphones — after all, just about every smartphone has both a camera and GPS. Canon has taken noticed and has patented a method in which the camera will make EXIF data less accurate than what the hardware recorded. For example, rather than say the exact time a photo was taken, it could give a time range (that example uses an hour) and as opposed to an exact latitude and longitude it will give a bounding box, with the location in question somewhere inside of it.
Ultimately, Canon’s patent concerns the process of adding some degree of fuzziness to the recorded data. It’s a better solution than removing the information entirely, though it remains to be seen if the patent gets through the Japanese system.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a company work to obscure EXIF data. Adobe’s Lightroom 4 makes it possible for the user to define a certain area as a privacy zone. Any shots that are tagged with geo data inside that zone will give their location as predefined area, as opposed to an exact point.