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Updated Privacy and Community Guidelines

The Old Man

Entry posted by The Old Man in News

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Unless you've been living under a rock, on Mars or have possibly been abducted by The Polaroid Stalker, you will have no doubt heard about changes to Privacy and Data Protection in Europe called General Data Protection Regulation (or GDPR for short). The legislation in reality effects and improves the rights of everyone.

As you would expect, we have always respected your privacy and the processing of your personal data/information, and we will continue to do so. 

Our community software suite recently received additional functionality and tools to better facilitate compliance with the new GDPR legislation.

We have therefore recently made enhancements to our Privacy Policy, which take effect from May 26th, 2018.

Our Privacy policy increases transparency, explains our role and responsibilities in terms of storing, using and safeguarding your data. It explains what you can expect if you make contact with us and use our services. It also serves as an introduction to your rights under GDPR.

There are understandably lots of interpretations, wild claims and opinions on GDPR. However, we believe GDPR isn't about ruining your enjoyment of the internet, it's good news for all of us.

We manage an awesome website, we're open and transparent,  but we're not lawyers or GDPR experts. So for further information and better understanding, we highly recommend reading the guidance available at the ICO website, which you can find here.

We have also taken the opportunity to review and update our Guidelines.

Thank you for your time, understanding and for your continued use of our website.

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B1SH0P-BL4CK

Wait a second I NEED HELP!! for some reason when I posted about my comics it gave my exact location and device I used?! I can't fix it either!? 

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  • Elders (Admins)
The Old Man
  • Elders (Admins)

Hi,

Location and GPS data in photos can be really useful especially on photo gallery and photo mapping sites. However, in some usage cases you don't want to reveal a location.

This query was resolved but for anyone else interested or concerned...

If you upload photos into our Gallery taken with a phone/tablet device etc that you had previously or unknowingly left set to include location data in the image (embedded GPS coordinates inside the file's EXIF data), our Gallery will show an optional map near the image, showing where it was taken.

Under the map is a tool setting marked Privacy, in which is a simple on/off toggle switch. You can switch it off, or on again.

Standard device data like make, model etc, isn't really personal (identifying) data, but you can certainly opt to strip it/remove it using various image processing software and apps. This sort of data is like iris, exposure, focus, flash data, it gets stored by your device (usually automatically) when you take a photo and can be quite useful, especially for sorting images or seeing how you got such a great photo. Depending upon the device, it may be possible to select which EXIF data the camera adds to the image file.

 

 

 

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  • Elders (Admins)
The Old Man
  • Elders (Admins)

Further update, I've now installed and switched image processing over to ImageMagick and set it to automatically strip EXIF data from uploaded images by default, in order to ensure sensitive details (such as GPS geolocation data from images taken with mobile phones) is not retained.

This way, given that we're not a photography based website, is probably better than relying on the user when uploading to opt to disable the location map on their uploaded photos if they don't want a map to show.

ImageMagick is an advanced image manipulation program available on some hosts. It provides benefits over the GD library such as more efficient handling of very large images and the ability to retain animation in resized animated gifs.

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