It’s cursed because it happens silently, such that you might accidentally be deleting gps data you wanted to keep without noticing, for a reason that you probably wouldn’t think to check, probably instead erroneously filing a bug on the app for doing it.
Unless I’m uploading pictures to cloud storage I want GPS data filed off. I’d rather have some unnecessary bug reports targeting the wrong things then stalkers showing up at my door.
Immich is a self-hosted photo hosting service. They’re listing this in their docs because people are trying to upload photos with GPS data, hitting this cursed behavior because they didn’t give immich Location access (because why would you?), and then filing unnecessary bug reports on them about their disappearing data.
To be clear, no one is against stripping GPS data, that’s not what anyone takes issue with, it’s the silently part that is unexpected behavior.
I think all apps should have those explanation screens of what’s not going to work if you deny X permission and why, especially in the case of an issue like this
It should request location access, and if it’s denied tell the user that it won’t be able to get the location data from images and give them a button to have it ask permission again
