A Welsh Leaf

I was sent this wonderful image. I don’t know who sent it; the email address it purported to come from bounced back.

Through the magic of TinEye and PicScout I can probably track down the source, once I post it online.

But it’s not mine to post.

Whoever took the photograph should be proud. He or she has a good eye. I see a Welsh dragon in the shadow, which is why I’ve titled this ‘A Welsh Leaf’. (Everything looks like a nail to a hammer.) And the proud photographer probably added all sorts of information in the metadata, some automatically input by her DSLR or smartphone camera, some which she might have added to describe the image, caption it, keyword it, to help people to find it, buy it, share it, credit it.

But apart from its incomprehensible auto-created filename — 208655-1000-14471607882761860-R3L8T8D-1000-gjVfnT8.jpg — all the metadata you’d expect to be associated with this image has been stripped away. I don’t know who took this photograph, where, or when.

Why? Facebook, to name just one of the many social networks that automatically flail an image of its metadata (Google+ is the honorable exception), doesn’t deign to answer questions put to them, leaving users to speculate uselessly. The most popular theories aired online are

1. To preserve users’ privacy
2. To save space
3. To lock people in
4. To obtain licensing rights

Well we can discard #1 immediately, as acquiring your personal details is the whole purpose of a social network site — although it might have a scintilla of truth in that they’d be very reluctant to share anything with another social network, and if they left the EXIF and metadata intact then everyone could see it.

#2 makes a tiny bit of sense. Metadata can scarcely take up more than 1% of an image’s filesize, but these guys make their profits through nanopercentages. With 400 million images uploaded daily to Facebook, each say 50Kb, that’s 400 gigabytes they could save each day.

#3 Locking people in? They’ve got you by the short ‘n’ curlies already, but they might want to try and cement the relationship.

Which brings us to #4.

In Facebook’s Terms & Conditions, read by at least 1% of users, they assert that
“For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license (my bold) to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.”

What does this actually mean? It means they can do whatever they want with your images, and they can sell that right on to whomsoever they please. Money. Power.

It doesn’t matter that the image is lo-res at 72 ppi; they’re only interested in digital usages.

If you upload Jane Jones’s image under a Creative Commons licence to your Facebook page, and supply the appropriate credit, you are doing no wrong. But Facebook will strip the metadata and under the T&Cs you agreed to, you have granted them a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any intellectual property content that you post.

So who does Jane Jones sue? Certainly not Facebook. Even the government daren’t sue Facebook.

They ignore copyright laws with impunity. They ignore tax laws with impunity. Corporations such as this are striving to become supranational, to become greater than the law, more powerful than independent states.

And stripping the metadata is the broken pane of glass that allows them to get away with it. They’re taking the locks off your doors. It shouldn’t be allowed. It shouldn’t be possible.

A Happy New Year to you all.