EXIF metadata and privacy
Every photo taken with a phone carries, alongside the pixels, metadata blocks with the date, camera model, and often the exact GPS coordinates of where the photo was taken. Removing those blocks without touching the image itself is a byte-surgery operation, quite different from re-exporting the photo from scratch, which recompresses everything and can even wash out the colour.
The default behaviour keeps the ICC profile because it is not personal data, it only describes colour.
Each PNG chunk carries its own checksum, so removing one never forces a checksum recalculation on another.
TIFF, BMP, and AVIF fall back to the re-encode path, the only route available for those containers.
Privacy. EXIF can contain the exact GPS coordinates of where the photo was taken (home, work), plus the device model, the date and the camera's serial number, which is identical across every photo you take and lets an anonymous image be linked to the rest of your personal archive.
For JPEG, PNG, and WebP, no: the removal is a byte-surgery operation that only erases the metadata blocks and keeps the compressed pixel data exactly the same. Only formats without that support, like TIFF or BMP, go through a re-encode that can slightly alter the compression.
The latitude and longitude coordinates of where the camera was at the moment of the shot, and often also the exact date and time, the device model, and the settings used (aperture, ISO, exposure time). Publishing a photo without cleaning that data can reveal the photographer home address.
Because the ICC profile describes the image colour space (such as sRGB or Adobe RGB), it identifies no one and reveals no location; removing it only makes the photo display wrong colours in colour-managed software, with zero privacy benefit.
No, those formats do not have the byte-surgery support that JPEG, PNG, and WebP have, so the cleanup goes through re-exporting the image via a canvas, which decodes and re-compresses the pixels, and stops being bit-for-bit identical to the original file.
Reading and removal happen entirely in your browser. No image is sent to any server.