Privacy
Coordinates to a few metres, plus altitude and heading
Photo GPS is not a city name; it is a coordinate pair to a few metres, often with altitude and compass bearing, which locates a room.
Guides on Privacy: Who could see it, how, and what each path costs to close, Soft delete, backups, caches and logs, Sometimes, and the policy clause that says so is easy to miss
Photo GPS data is usually precise to within a few metres, not a neighbourhood or a city block. The US government's GPS.gov puts GPS-enabled smartphones at "typically accurate to within a 4.9 m (16 ft.) radius under open sky," and that fix is what gets written into the file.
What the field actually contains
The EXIF GPS block is not a single number. It typically holds latitude and longitude to several decimal places, which at typical precision narrows a location to a specific room or parking spot rather than a general area. Many devices also write altitude, which can hint at a floor in a building, and a compass heading recorded at the moment of capture, which indicates which direction the camera was pointed. Some also include a timestamp separate from the file's own date field, tied specifically to the GPS fix rather than the shutter - ExifTool's GPS tag reference lists it as GPSTimeStamp, the "UTC time of GPS fix," alongside GPSAltitude and GPSImgDirection. Put together, this is closer to a floor plan entry than a location tag.
Why the precision is higher indoors than people expect
GPS accuracy is popularly associated with outdoor use - hiking apps, driving directions - where a few metres of drift is common knowledge. Satellite accuracy itself "worsens near buildings, bridges, and trees," GPS.gov notes, but indoor photos often use assisted positioning that blends GPS with Wi-Fi and cell tower data, which can stay usefully precise in a dense urban area, precisely where reliable satellite lock is hardest to get. The result is that an indoor photo, taken in a bedroom, is not automatically less precisely located than an outdoor one - it depends on the device and the surrounding signal environment, not on being indoors as such.
What this means in practice
For a photo taken at home and uploaded anywhere, the GPS field is not a fuzzy hint about a city. It is close to an address. Stripping EXIF before uploading removes this field along with everything else in one pass, and given how precise it actually is, it is the single highest-value field on the entire list to remove, ahead of anything else metadata carries. Checking what a file contains before you send it is the way to confirm the field is gone rather than assume it.
Where this sits relative to everything else
None of this affects how a photo is scored - a rating model has no channel to a GPS field, only to pixels. It matters entirely as a disclosure question, on the same footing as any other identifying field a file carries into an upload box. A file sent to a human judge carries the same field with the same precision, and what belongs in a submission for a human review is worth thinking through with that in mind. Services that are careful about ingest generally say so, and a comparison of tools on exactly this point - Penis Rater's rundown of tool practices - is a more useful reference than any single privacy policy read in isolation. A tape measure records no location at all, which is one of the few genuine advantages Measure My Cock's method has over any photo-based approach.