An empirical analysis of what metadata platforms like X, Facebook, and Instagram remove, and what digital fingerprints survive re-encoding.
When you upload a photo to major social media platforms, their ingest pipelines strip standard EXIF GPS tags and re-encode the image at controlled resolutions.
However, the stripped images still retain unique dimensional ratios, color space profiles (ICC APP2), quantization noise, and occasionally software tags.
Security Analyst and Aspiring Security Engineer passionate about digital image forensics, OSINT research, CTF steganography challenges, and client-side application security.
How to extract high-precision GPS coordinates, altitude, and camera angles from photographs, and how to verify location authenticity.
How open-source investigators and forensic analysts link disputed photos to specific camera bodies and lenses using hardware serial tags.