How GPS metadata is written into your photos
Your phone's location chip encodes latitude, longitude, altitude and heading with meter-level accuracy.
When you enable location for your camera app, the OS asks the GNSS/GPS chip for a fix and injects six values into the EXIF block: latitude, longitude, altitude, heading (which way the lens was pointing), the GPS timestamp, and often the horizontal accuracy.
Precision is typically 4–8 decimal places, which resolves to a few meters. That's enough to pinpoint the exact bench in a park, not just the park. Altitude can reveal what floor of a building you were on.
Turn off location for the camera app if you don't want this. On iOS: Settings → Privacy → Location Services → Camera → Never. On Android: App info → Camera → Permissions → Location.
Related: if a photo arrives with no GPS at all — which is normal for anything that's passed through social media — see [How to Geolocate a Photo With No GPS Data](/guides/how-to-geolocate-photo-without-gps).