What Happens When You Hit Send
02 What happens when you hit send
Most platforms strip location and camera data automatically when you upload - genuinely good for privacy. The side effect: that same process destroys the "signed authenticity" credentials (C2PA / Content Credentials) that newer cameras and AI tools now attach to images, since those are stored as metadata too. One quirk worth knowing: sending a photo on WhatsApp as a "document" instead of a normal photo skips the re-processing entirely - credentials, location data, and all, untouched.
Go deeper: what specifically survives an upload, platform by platform
Content Credentials (C2PA) are a signed manifest that cameras and AI tools like Adobe Firefly or OpenAI's image tools now attach, recording edit history and whether AI was involved. They're stored as metadata, which is exactly why they don't reliably survive being shared - not because platforms are hiding them on purpose, but because metadata routinely dies in ordinary re-encoding pipelines built for other reasons (smaller files, format normalization) long before C2PA existed.
What's been documented: Meta's apps generally don't preserve credentials in the file you download. WhatsApp strips metadata on a normal photo send, but sending the same file as a "document" transmits it untouched. TikTok added reading of Content Credentials early and applies its own AI-generated label independently. LinkedIn and Cloudflare are among the few that preserve credentials through their pipelines rather than stripping them. Platform behavior changes fairly often as pipelines get updated, so treat any specific claim - including this one - as a snapshot, not a permanent fact.
Where metadata actually goes when you upload
There isn't one universal answer, because "upload" covers a lot of different pipelines. Some platforms strip metadata client-side before the file ever leaves your device; others accept the original file and strip it server-side during transcoding; a few read specific fields (like AI-generation labels) before discarding the rest. The practical effect is usually the same - EXIF and C2PA both routinely vanish - but why differs, and that matters if you're trying to reason about what a platform could theoretically still have even after your download shows a clean file.
Video and image pipelines aren't always treated identically either. A platform that carefully preserves provenance signals for images may transcode video through a completely different pipeline that doesn't, simply because video transcoding is a much heavier, more format-dependent process.