Couldn't the same conclusion be reached, without? That plane flying overhead, center, would probably make things much easier.
I would like to know what else is embedded in digital pictures, similar to the printer yellow dots, except it will be undetectable.
Sensor noise has been used to successfully identify the camera used to take a picture. No embedded features just the physical characteristics of sensors being individual enough to identify.
Always, always, ALWAYS black out the sky.
Plot twist: they replaced the sky with a different starry background.
You’ve confused the data with the metadata.
Exif data is the metadata of the image.
Exactly, whereas stars shown in the image are just data, you don't need the exif data to see them.
But the time the photo was taken was extracted from the exif which is what OP was referring to stripping
The lesson here isn’t to strip exif data, though. It’s to identify information that can be connected to anything to infer metadata that you want to keep hidden.
If you always wipe exif data, and don’t investigate your pictures, then you will eventually neglect some combination of data points someone could use to infer richer context.
If you can see stars, satellites and planets you can figure out the time. It makes the problem a little harder (you've got to locate a point in 2+1 dimensional space rather than on the 2 dimensional surface of the Earth), but it's not a fundamental difference.
metadata is actually a form of data, believe it or not.
The data’s data!
Metadata is data, but without legs
I assumed that was the joke? If they're finding the location based on the stars in the image, you'd need to strip out the actual image data (not metadata) to prevent that.