A photograph is not just a picture. It carries where it was taken, on what device, at what moment — and people attach photos to AI chats all day without ever being told that.
The part of a photo you cannot see
Every picture your phone takes has an EXIF block attached to it: GPS coordinates, the device serial number, a timestamp. A photo taken in your kitchen carries your home address, to about the width of the street. Send it to an assistant and the address goes with it, silently, in a message you thought was about the recipe.
Secure AI redraws the image before anything is sent. Drawing to a canvas and exporting keeps the pixels and nothing else — a canvas has no notion of metadata blocks, so they cannot survive the trip. The rotation tag is applied while decoding, so the picture is not left sideways as a side effect of removing what rotated it.
If that step fails, the attachment fails. It does not fall back to sending the original bytes, because quietly sending an unstripped photo is the exact outcome the step exists to prevent.
A picture taken at home is a picture of your address.
Documents are read on your machine
A PDF, a Word file or a spreadsheet is opened and read in the app itself, and only the text travels. The file never leaves your computer.
That is worth stating plainly because the usual arrangement is the opposite: the file goes up, a server parses it, and the document — the contract, the payslip, the scan of a letter — now exists somewhere else in its original form. Reading it locally means what reaches a model is the same kind of thing as a message you typed, and is treated the same way: names, card numbers, addresses and the rest are taken out of it before it goes, exactly as described in what a model never sees.
What you can attach
- •Images — redrawn, so no EXIF, no GPS, no device serial.
- •PDF, Word, Excel — read on your machine, sent as text.
- •Text, Markdown, JSON, CSV — read directly.
Anything else is refused with a message naming what is accepted, rather than a generic failure that leaves you guessing whether the file was too big, the wrong type, or the app was broken.
Questions
Does stripping the photo change how it looks?
No. The pixels are what is kept. Animated GIFs are the one exception and are passed through untouched — a canvas holds a single frame, so re-encoding one would flatten the animation, and a GIF is an unlikely carrier of GPS coordinates.
What about a scanned document that is really an image?
It is treated as an image: stripped of metadata, then read. A scan of a letter is one of the better reasons to care about the strip, since it was usually photographed somewhere personal.
Should I attach something sensitive at all?
The honest answer is that fewer things need attaching than people think, and some things are better left out of any chatbot. What this page describes is what happens when you decide to — not an argument that everything is safe to send.
Try Secure AI free
Frontier AI chat — encrypted by default, with your identity stripped before any request reaches the provider.