Jane,
I think some people strip it as a matter of a sense of privacy and even sometimes competitive reasons...not wanting others to see exactly what you're doing. And as caryb said, it's probably more often done to streamline/reduce file size when posting to the web.
Thanks for the tip ohenry, I went to Firefox's plugin page and installed the exif reader...now all I have to do is right-clik on any image and select exif reader from the dialog box - it's way easy. I already had some exif readers, but I don't think any of them could do that.
I installed several other very useful free browser plugins while there (they have almost 2,000 of them). Very cool.
Cheers,
