Uploading a photo taken by some smartphones to Facebook, a blog, Twitter and other social networks or other places on the Internet can actually reveal sensitive information like where you live without you even realising it.
Smartphones such as I-phones by default tags photos with GPS coordinates. Tech savvy persons can extract the location from the picture's metadata, then look up the GPS coordinates stored in the photo's EXIF tag and get an address. Stalkers, crazy ex-spouses, vengeful mobsters and other creepy types can do this also. It seems to be a useful tool for law enforcement officials so gangsters, beware!
Who knew that simply shelling out top dollar for a cool mobile phone that keeps you connected to the Internet while on the go, is an entertainment hub with music videos, movies and hundreds of tunes at your fingertips, provides Instant messaging features among other hi-teck features that you would also be purchasing a security risk that could endanger you and your family? Serious food for thought.
According to
Wikipedia,
Geotagging is the process of adding geographical identification
metadata to various media such as photographs, video, websites, or
RSS feeds and is a form of
geospatial metadata. These data usually consist of
latitude and longitude coordinates, though they can also include
altitude,
bearing, distance, accuracy data, and place names. It is commonly used for photographs.
However, few people are tech savvy and the feature embedded in the phones are not that easy to turn off or disable as an
article in Yahoo Finance pointed out. "I’d say very few people know about geotag capabilities,” said Peter Eckersley, a staff technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, “and consent is sort of a slippery slope when the only way you can turn off the function on your smartphone is through an invisible menu that no one really knows about.”
"Indeed, disabling the geotag function generally involves going through several layers of menus until you find the “location” setting, then selecting “off” or “don’t allow.” But doing this can sometimes turn off all GPS capabilities, including mapping, so it can get complicated." The article continued.
