Almost nothing here is about hackers. Photo privacy is mostly a set of small, ordinary mistakes — a box drawn instead of a redaction, a geotag nobody switched off, a reflection in an oven door — made by careful people in a hurry. These articles work through them one at a time.
The through-line is a single distinction that turns out to matter enormously: the difference between hiding information and removing it. A black rectangle drawn over text in a PDF hides it. A blur applied to a license plate hides it. Neither removes anything, and both have failed in public, repeatedly, in documents reviewed by people who were paying close attention.
Where a piece touches the law we say what the actual instrument is and link to the regulator rather than paraphrasing from memory, and we say plainly that it is not legal advice. Where a claim needs a source, the source is named in the text. If you find something wrong, tell us — corrections are genuinely welcome and they get made.
25 August 2026 · 8 min read · start here
A black box drawn over text covers it on screen and leaves every character in the file, selectable and searchable. Three documented cases — a court filing, a security manual, a military report — and the four checks that would have caught all of them. Read this one first.
18 August 2026 · 7 min read
Mostly no, and the demos that suggest otherwise are doing something different from what they appear to. Where blur and pixelation genuinely fail, and why a model that invents a plausible face is not the same as one that recovers a real one.
11 August 2026 · 7 min read
The GPS coordinates in a photo place it within a few metres. But the picture usually gives away more than the metadata does — reflections, house numbers, uniforms, and the things sitting on your kitchen table.
4 August 2026 · 5 min read
A decision guide rather than a feature list. What each operation does to the pixels, which one to reach for in each situation, and the specific cases where people reliably pick the wrong one.
28 July 2026 · 6 min read
Publishing an incident is a different problem from handing footage to an insurer or the police — and you should generally not redact evidence. Plus the on-screen overlay of speed, time and coordinates that most people forget is burnt into the picture.
21 July 2026 · 6 min read
The photographer in the oven door, the family photographs on the fridge, the neighbour at the window, and the house number on the bin. Written for someone who shoots twenty properties a month.
14 July 2026 · 8 min read
When a photograph is personal data, why consent is usually the wrong lawful basis for it, and the special category problem that most guides skip entirely.
7 July 2026 · 6 min read
Step by step on iPhone, Android, Windows, macOS and the command line — and why an online EXIF checker asks you to hand over the exact file you were worried about.