Digital attribution: Stripped search | The Economist: MAGE metadata can carry sensitive information about its creator: GPS-derived geographic co-ordinates, say. They therefore deserve to be obscured. Twitter and Facebook, for instance, often strip much metadata as a matter of course for that reason. All too often, though, websites remove such information not to protect the creator, but to appropriate his creation. Images are cropped to excise visible watermarks or digitally scrubbed to get rid of metadata using readily available digital erasors. This lets unscrupulous users dispense with proper attribution—and, crucially, compensation—to an image's originator.
