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This old ABC News clip dramatically announces a "new and freightening threat [...] unknown to many Internet crime experts", which exposes a child's location via pictures posted to Twitter, Facebook, Craigslist, Photobucket.

Does Facebook expose location of pictures, without the user actively specifying it?

Be it via picture GPS metadata or IP geolocalization or anything. Let's say the posted picture contains GPS data and shows not recognizable landmarks. This question is about the Facebook website, not about the Facebook smartphone apps.

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Facebook now strips all metadata from posted pictures to avoid this problem:

What information can someone see when they download my photo from Facebook?

However, be careful when you post links to photos on other websites or when using third-party image hosting services with Facebook, Twitter, etc.

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you could try doing a reverse image search, whereby you upload the image to google's image search page, and google will search for similar images to the one you uploaded, if it finds any matches, you can visit the web page the similar image is located on and check it for any clues as to the location, more info on this method is located here: https://www.labnol.org/internet/find-picture-location/21273/

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  • If the picture contains some recognizable public object, then I guess it is natural that the location can be guessed, it is OK :-)
    – nic
    Sep 18, 2017 at 4:08
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    being recognisable by a computer algorithm with access to hundreds of millions of images, and being recognisable to a human who has visited a handful of locations in their lifetime, are 2 different things ;-) Sep 18, 2017 at 17:23
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Technology aside, it's very hard to take a picture without some identifying location details appearing in the background. These may not provide exact co-ordinate locations, but to someone who knows the general area they may be "good enough".

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