Privacy · 7 min read
Check a Video for GPS Location and Faces Before You Post It
You film your kids in the garden, a flat for rent, a neighbourhood dispute or a protest, and you want to share the clip. What most people do not realise is that the video file can tell the recipient where it was filmed, down to a few metres, on which phone and at what exact time. And the picture itself may show faces and number plates of people who never agreed to be posted.
This guide explains what a phone video gives away, which ways of sharing remove it and which do not, and how to make a clean copy with Toolula's Video Privacy Check without uploading the video anywhere.
What a phone video stores besides the picture
Video files have a container with tags. Phones fill them in automatically when location access is on for the camera.
- Location: iPhones write it as com.apple.quicktime.location.ISO6709, Android and Samsung phones as a ©xyz entry, as latitude and longitude
- Device: the phone's make and model and often the software version
- Recording time: the exact date and time the clip was made
- Names and text: titles, comments or an author field, if an app filled them in
Which ways of sharing remove it
Many social networks strip these tags when they process an upload. But a lot of sharing passes the original file on byte for byte: sending it as a file in a messenger, a cloud or download link, an email attachment, a USB stick or a court or insurance submission. Whoever receives it can read the location with any metadata viewer.
Because platforms change their processing and you rarely know how a clip will travel after the first share, the safe habit is to remove the tags yourself before the video leaves your phone or computer.
Check and clean a video in one go
Open Video Privacy Check and drop the video. It reads the tags first and lists what it found: the location with its coordinates, the device, the recording time, names and text, and how many other technical tags there are. At the same time it looks through the picture for faces and number plates and shows when they are visible.
- Remove all tags (location, device, time, names)
- Blur the faces and number plates it found, with blur, pixelate or a black box
- Remove the sound, because voices, names and background noise can also identify people and places
- Click Make a safe copy; the new file is read back and the page confirms that no location, device, time or other tags are left
No quality loss unless you blur
Removing tags or the sound does not touch the picture: the video and audio are copied as they are, so there is no quality loss and a long video is done in seconds. Only blurring needs the picture re-encoded once, on your device.
If you just want the tags gone, Remove Video Metadata does that on its own. And every other Toolula video tool, from Compress to Trim, leaves out the location, device and recording time by default; a checkbox in each tool lets you keep them when you need them.
When the automatic blur is not enough
The detectors look at five frames per second, link what they find into moving areas and follow a face or a plate as it moves. Small, turned-away, covered or distant faces and far-away plates can still be missed, so watch the preview before you export.
For anything else that must not be seen, such as a house number, a name badge, a screen or a letter on the table, open Blur Video Areas. There you can add up to eight areas of your own, each with its own effect, strength and time range. Use pixelate at a high setting or a black box for faces, plates and text: a light blur can sometimes be partly reversed, a black box cannot.
Nothing is uploaded
Checking a video for private data by uploading it to someone else's server would defeat the point. Toolula reads, scans and writes the video inside your browser tab with WebCodecs; the face and plate detectors are loaded from toolula.com and run on your device. There is no fixed size limit, because the video is read in slices and the result is written straight to disk.
Frequently asked questions
Do all phone videos contain the location?
Only when the camera app is allowed to use the location. On most phones it is on by default after you agree once. Video Privacy Check shows either the coordinates or No location in the file.
Does removing the metadata change the video?
No. Picture and sound are copied unchanged into a new file without the tags. Only blurring faces and plates re-encodes the picture once.
What about photos?
Photos store the same kind of data as EXIF. Remove EXIF Data in Toolula Image strips it from JPEG, PNG and WebP without re-encoding, and Blur Faces & Plates covers faces in still pictures.
Can the blur be undone?
A light blur sometimes partly can. The strong pixelate settings average each area down to a few blocks, which removes the detail for good, and a black box hides it completely.