Be careful posting pictures.

This is an excerpt from an article I was reading on posting pictures and robberies...

Where You Took a Photo

Some people are likely unaware that their cellphone or digital camera captures Geotag location information every time they take a picture. Geotagging a photo seems harmless enough right? Wrong!

The geotag, which doesn't appear in the actual image, but is none the less part of the picture's 'meta data', can be viewed and extracted. If criminals extract the location information from the picture you posted on an online sale or auction site, then they now know the exact GPS location of the item in the picture you snapped. If the item is of high value, then they might just come and steal it.

The geolocation data for most images is stored within the image file in a format know as EXchangeable Image file Format (EXIF). The EXIF format has placeholders for GPS information that often gets recorded as you take a photo with your smartphone. The location data can be extracted by EXIF viewer apps such as theEXIF Viewer Firefox Add-on or via an app such as EXIF Wizard for the iPhone, orJpeg EXIF Viewer for Android

You might consider downloading one of the above applications to see if your pictures have geotags embedded in them.

What can you do to protect yourself from stalkers and other bad guys using geotags to track you down?

Consider turning off location services on some location sharing apps

Find the location sharing settings on your smartphone and turn off the ones that you think might pose a personal safety risk. You can always turn them back on later if you want to.

Most smartphones will let you turn off location sharing for individual apps as an alternative to turning them off globally.

There are some apps such as 'Find My iPhone' that you won't want to disable location sharing on. If you do disable location sharing on apps like 'Find My iPhone', then your phone won't be able to relay its position and you won't be able to find it using the 'Find My iPhone' service should it get lost or stolen.

Remove geotags from your digital photos

If you want to remove geotag information from your image files then you can use an app such as deGeo (iPhone) or Photo Privacy Editor (Android) to remove the geotag info from your photos.

Consider turning off the location sharing setting of your phone's camera app as well so that the GPS info does not get recorded as part of the picture's meta data, this will save you the hassle of having to strip out the location data later on.

 

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Here is the link to the full article.

http://netsecurity.about.com/od/securityadvisorie1/a/Why-Stalkers-Love-Your-Geotags.htm

 

Also see this thread: https://www.cointalk.com/threads/taking-photos-with-a-cell-phone.251379/ Since we already have a discussion there, I'll close this topic ...

Christian