What Facebook Marketplace and eBay do with your photo's metadata.
Sellers often hear that the big sites strip location from photos. Some may remove it from the copy buyers see. But the sites read it first, and few of them publish what they keep. Here is what their own policies say.
The short answer
We could not find a help page from Meta or eBay that promises to remove the location from listing photos, or says which fields buyers can see. Both privacy policies say they collect metadata from what you upload. So the safe assumption is: the site reads everything in the file, and buyers may or may not be able to. If the photo was taken at home, remove the location before it leaves your phone.
Meta: Facebook, Marketplace and Messenger
Meta's privacy policy lists "metadata about content and messages" among what it collects, and describes metadata as information such as where a photo was taken and when a file was created. It also says that if you give Meta access to your camera roll, it collects metadata from and about your photos and videos, including the date and time they were made.
A Kaspersky test reported that Facebook removed EXIF from the picture files people could download but kept the information in its own database. Meta does not document which fields it removes from that copy or whether that holds for every route a photo can take, so treat it as unconfirmed.
eBay
eBay's User Privacy Notice lists, among the information it collects, "certain metadata recording the settings of your camera included in images of items you upload for sale". We found no eBay help page that says whether the position is removed from listing photos.
Other marketplaces
For Etsy, Vinted, Depop and Craigslist we found no published statement either way. Sites change their image pipelines without notice, and the same site can treat the app and the website differently. Test it yourself:
- Take a photo with location on, somewhere that is not your home.
- Post it in a draft or a listing you remove afterwards.
- Open the photo in the listing at full size, save it, and read its metadata as in check a file is clean.
That tells you what buyers can read today. It does not tell you what the site kept.
Messages and email are different
When a buyer asks for more photos and you send them directly, the platform's processing may not apply at all. An email attachment arrives as the file you attached. Apple's sharing guide says sharing a photo from an iPhone shares its metadata, such as date and time, location, device and captions, unless you turn Location off under Options. Google Photos does not share a location it estimated, but a location the camera recorded goes with the file, per its help page.
What to do
Take listing photos with the camera's location off. On iPhone that is Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services > Camera > Never; on Android it is in the camera app's own settings. Remove the location from a photo has the steps for each. That alone is enough for the position: a photo taken without it has none to leak. The camera model and the time are still in the file, which matters less for most sellers.
Or clean it here
For photos you have already taken, FileSanity's photo cleaner removes the position, the device, the dates and any names from JPEG, PNG and HEIC files in your browser, without uploading them. With a Pro plan, the batch page does a whole listing's photos at once.
Checked
Menu paths checked on 9 October 2026 against the pages linked above. Menus move between versions; when yours differs, the vendor's page is the authority. Found a mistake? Tell us.