It’s long been known that Facebook strips the metadata from photographs and other images that are uploaded. I’ve never seen an official answer from Facebook as to why they do this, but the leading theory seems to be one of privacy. With 136,000 images being uploaded to Facebook every single minute, that’s a lot of potential GPS and other private information. But it does also total up to a lot of potentially wasted storage space, too.

Photographers have moaned against the removal of metadata for a while, but German photographers association, Freelens, and specifically, Freelens executive committee member and Berlin photographer, Rainer Steußloff has challenged this practice in court. The ruling came in a few days ago, and the photographer won. It is now illegal for Facebook to strip metadata in Germany.

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