In this case it was a bunch of high school kids uploading their work in the form of an image to a… I wont say low effort but definitely low support pre-google learning website. I remember the python tool they were using just stripped all exif data and to be truthful don’t know it it had options to leave some of it intact. The real factor here is if the phone manufacturers, apple being one of them had bothered to fix the orientation of a image to its actual orientation and used the viewing software to orient it to the screen it wouldn’t have been a problem. Instead they used the exif data which guaranteed when the image was processed in any way that altered that exif data it would come out wrong unless it happened to have been taken in the correct orientation with the camera itself. Which wasn’t the natural orientation when taking a picture with a smart phone.