geotags in digital photos

[jeffbert]

According to the gizmag article, many digital cameras betray their owners' locations:

http://www.gizmag.com/online-predators-can-determine-where-posted-photos-and-videos-were-shot/15818/

The predators are our concern here, because as the article points out, very few people know of this.

Since the technical backgrounds of our users varies widely, I felt it appropriate to bring this up. Some of you have posted photos of your collections, & even yourselves on this forum. I advise you to reconsider keeping such images online, if they were taken by digital cameras. Apparently there should be a way to disable the geotag feature, but I suppose it varies by camera.

The consequences, according to the article, can include the thieves finding your name and address online, though you thought your IDs were not made public. They can raid your homes while you are on vacation, assuming you upload while vacationing. While this may be unlikely, it still exists.

irate:

[AprilSeven]

Wow - that IS creepy. Why on earth wouldn't they let people know about this, so they could either disable the function or choose not to post photos. I wonder if this is also a concern for all the people I know who store their family photos on sites like Picasa and Flickr?

Thanks for the heads-up, Jeffbert -- I'm spreading the word about this.

[LLM]

Why does a photo need to know it's exact longitude and latitude? I wonder if the makers of cameras/video recorders/phones will make the option more obvious to users or default to disabled.

[diehard67]

they should, but for the momant if users run there photos threw a program that strips off the meta data before uploading it, hhhmmmmmm, I wounder if the facebook kipi plugin strips exif data from jpeg files

I jusd tested and the meta data doesn't servive being uploaded to facebook, it gets striped off when there server resized the picture, so for facebook at least those geotags are not an issue they will not be there after the pic shows up in there profile

[fafner]

This is exactly the kind of feature that was implemented for "convenience" that end up a huge security issue.

Microsoft in the past implemented convenient ways to execute code in mails so they can be made more interactive and interesting, until someone figured out that the same scripting could be used for malicious goals (such as stealing your contacts informations, or simply plant spyware on the computer to impersonate you). Then Microsoft struggled to deactivate any single hole they had planted themselves (and still find some regularly).

Geotagging has been added as a convenient way to find out where you had taken a photograph. It is convenient to find out where you had taken this photography during vacations you don't remember about. They simply didn't think that with this feature enabled by default, people can literally tell the world where they live, and even when they are in vacation. All that without being aware of it of course, much more funny

Short thinking I tell ya...