Maintaining anonymity on Twitter

February 24, 2019 10:00 AM

How can I strip metadata and any information about me, my location, my device, etc. from photos or images I use on Twitter?

I'm ignorant about this. Maybe I'm making too much about it.

Privacy geeks:
Let's say I draw a picture on paper, take a picture on my phone (iPhone), and upload it? What information is there and how can I get rid of it? What if I take a screenshot via Skitch on my desktop /laptop/tablet?

Other scenarios? Are these settings? Is there something I can run an image through prior to use for privacy that will scrub that information?

I want to know what the technical creepy corner cases are of people finding out information about others through their images.

OK to DM if you'd rather not advertise to anyone who may be unaware of how to do a creepy thing on Twitter -- I do not want to play detective on other people's stuff, but I need to know how it's done in order to know the best practices.

I do know IP addresses are stored with posts, but those are available to Twitter and/or law enforcement with a subpoena. I'm talking about what a motivated jerk could figure out.

posted by A Terrible Llama to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Best answer: Twitter removes EXIF data when the image is uploaded, and I believe they only display derived versions of images, never the originals. I found a comparison chart from a few years ago that is a little hard for me to interpret, but should at least provide a launching point for terminology to search for.
posted by rhizome at 10:10 AM on February 24, 2019 [3 favorites]

Best answer: Twitter like most social media sites remove metadata from the published file but retain it for their own purposes and it could be made available to other third parties.

https://imageoptim.com/mac will remove the metadata very quickly.
posted by Lanark at 10:39 AM on February 24, 2019 [5 favorites]

Best answer: Twitter can display your location along with the tweet but this is "off by default and you will need to opt in to use it".

Rhizome's link shows images are stripped of metadata by twitter but if you want to make extra sure then you could use an app on your phone to share the images without metadata.

A non-photo technique people have used to deduce who is behind a twitter account is a password reset which by default displays the partial email address - you can prevent this from happening.
posted by JonB at 10:42 AM on February 24, 2019 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Metadata anonymisation toolkit. Good practice to run it through every file intended for uploading.
posted by Bangaioh at 11:21 AM on February 24, 2019 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks everyone, this was helpful and semi-comforting.
posted by A Terrible Llama at 2:46 PM on February 28, 2019 [1 favorite]