Take a photo on a phone and it records more than the picture. Most cameras write the time, the device, and the exact coordinates into the file.
That is useful when you are looking for holiday photos. It is less useful attached to a picture of your fuse box on a system that other people can be shown.
What we do with it
Photos uploaded to Tradelynx are re-encoded and the embedded metadata is stripped before storage. The pixels survive. The coordinates do not.
It happens on every upload, without a setting, because a privacy control you have to find and enable protects the people who already knew to look for it.
Why re-encoding rather than deleting the fields
Deleting the fields you know about leaves the ones you do not. Cameras and apps write all sorts into image files, and the list changes.
Decoding an image to pixels and writing it out again discards everything that was not pixels. It is a blunter approach and it is the reason it keeps working when a new phone invents a new field.
There is a security benefit alongside the privacy one, which is that anything hidden in an image file alongside the picture does not survive the round trip either.
What it does not cover
The photo still shows what it shows. If you photograph a document, the document is in the picture, and no amount of metadata stripping changes that. Think about what is in frame, and we will handle what is in the file.