Strip Your Meta Data

Jan 14, 2021

It’s been a crazy start to the year. There’s been enough commentary on what went on in the US capitol and I don’t have much to add. All I’ll say is I’ve never been a Trump supporter or voted Republican and like many others, I was horrified to see people inside the building.

I started a post on accessibility and I made a couple of small edits to the site to get my lighthouse accessibility score up. Between work, running and stressing out about the pandemic and attempted coup, I’ve little time to spend on my personal website. It may be a while before I finish that.

If you’ve followed the news, the conservative social media platform parler has been taken down and got hacked right before it did. It turns out that they did not strip the meta-data from user’s photos. This is an EASY thing to do. I use imageMagick mogrify to resize and strip metadata from the images I use here. Here’s what I run

mogrify -strip -verbose -resize 250000@ assets/images/**/* assets/images/*.jpg assets/images/*.png

I have no sympathy for those that stormed the capitol and are going to get caught because they posted to social media. But it’s disappointing when developers don’t build in privacy as the default.

That’s all for now.