What happens to a photo after you post it publicly

Suhail — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In short

A photo can carry hidden details, including where and when it was taken. In 2012, one revealed where John McAfee was hiding.
Public photos have been scraped into face-search databases. European regulators have fined Clearview AI more than €90 million.
Since May 2025, Meta has trained its AI on public posts by adults in the EU. Private sharing keeps your photos out of reach.

In December 2012, journalists from Vice found John McAfee, the antivirus millionaire, who was on the run from police in Belize. They wanted to question him over a killing. The journalists posted a photo of him online.

Readers soon noticed something the journalists hadn't. Hidden inside the photo file were the GPS coordinates of where it was taken, in Guatemala. McAfee first claimed the data was faked. Then he admitted it was right.

The picture showed a man. The file showed where he was.

What a photo carries

Every photo from a phone is two things: the picture, and a small record attached to it. That record, known as EXIF data, can include:

the date and time it was taken,
the make and model of the camera or phone,
and, when location is switched on, the exact place: latitude, longitude, even which way the camera was facing.

Many apps now strip this data when you upload. Not all do, and photos sent as files often keep everything.

The noticeboard at the station

Posting a photo publicly is like pinning it to the noticeboard at a busy railway station.

Anyone walking past can see it. Strangers stop to look as well as friends.
Anyone can copy it. A quick phone photo, and it's theirs.
You can take yours down. But the copies stay with whoever made them.
Some passers-by aren't people. They're machines, copying every board in every station, all day.

That last point is the one most of us miss.

The machines at the board

Clearview AI built a face-search tool by automatically collecting public images from across the web, social media included, and turning the faces in them into searchable codes. By 2024, the Dutch data protection authority put its database at 30 billion images.

European regulators have pushed back hard. Italy, Greece and France each fined Clearview €20 million in 2022, and France added a further €5.2 million penalty in 2023 when the company didn't comply. In 2024, the Netherlands fined it €30.5 million. The Dutch regulator's chair, Aleid Wolfsen, said the company "cannot continue to violate the rights of Europeans and get away with it". In the UK, a separate case is still going through the courts.

AI training is the other kind of collection. In May 2025, after a pause requested by Ireland's data protection regulator, Meta began training its AI on public posts, comments and photos shared by adults on Facebook and Instagram across the EU. Private messages are excluded, and there's a form to object. And as Human Rights Watch found in 2024, photos of children had already ended up in a large AI training dataset. We wrote about why your photos don't train AI on Philos.

Stories change as they travel

Even when no machine is involved, a public photo loses its context as it moves. In a 2015 study, researchers asked people to pass a balanced news story along a chain, one person to the next. With each retelling, the message got shorter, less accurate and more negative.

A photo shared on is the same. The caption you wrote stays behind. Someone else writes a new one.

Keep your photos close

You don't have to stop sharing. You just have to choose the right wall.

Check your camera's location setting. On an iPhone, it's in Settings, Privacy & Security, Location Services, Camera.
Turn location off when you share a photo. In the iPhone share sheet, tap Options and switch off Location.
Share with people, not the public. A photo for twelve people doesn't need to be on a board for millions.

How Philos handles your photos

On Philos, there is no noticeboard. Nothing is public, every photo goes only to the people you choose, and nothing can be forwarded. Philos removes location and camera details from every photo you share, in posts, Moments and chats. Someone you haven't added sees only your name and photo. And your photos are never used to train AI.

Tonight, try one thing: open your camera's location setting and decide, on purpose, what it should be.

Your photos don't train AI

Suhail — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In short

Philos doesn't use your photos or messages to train AI.
Researchers have found real children's photos in a dataset used to train AI tools.
Once a model has learned from a photo, it can't forget it, so the best protection is not posting publicly.

A photo of your child's first day at school feels like it belongs to your family. Online, it can end up somewhere else entirely: in the data that AI tools learn from.

What researchers found

In 2024, Human Rights Watch found links to 170 personal photos of Brazilian children in LAION-5B, a large dataset that has been used to train popular AI image tools. Weeks later it reported 190 more photos of Australian children in the same dataset. The photos came from personal blogs and photo and video sites, some posted by the children's own parents years before.

Current AI models cannot forget data they were trained on.

That's the hard part. Deleting a photo from the place you posted it doesn't take it out of a model that has already learned from it.

Where Philos stands

Philos doesn't use your photos or messages to train AI. There's no AI anywhere in what we do with them. Your posts go to the people you choose, and to nobody else.

What we promise

Your photos and messages are never used to train AI.
Your data is never sold. Not your contacts, not your photos, not who you talk to.
You can download everything you've shared, or delete your account, any time in Settings.

The simplest protection

The surest way to keep a photo out of AI training data is not to post it publicly in the first place. Share the first day at school with the grandparents and the godparents, not with the whole internet. That's what Philos is for.

AI · The Philos blog