Anonymous No More: Be Careful Where You Send Those iPhone/Smartphone Pictures
Welcome to the world where everyone has a camera on them – their mobile phone. You use your phones camera to catch all sorts of moments in your life. When you hang out with your friends, when you are with your family, when you are putting less then savory pictures of yourself on the internet (?!). Hard to believe the last one is true!
Yup, we take these pictures – of any type – and share them. The only problem is, when you send that picture you are sending more then just a picture. You are also sending METADATA.
Now for the average computer user, you may not be aware what metadata is. Metadata is information the camera leaves on a picture such as camera model, shutter speed, resolution, time the picture was taken and for most smartphones with GPS, (especially the iPhone) the GPS coordinates of where the picture was taken.
GPS coordinates can be very useful to Geotag where you were at a specific moment. But lets say you take some less then savory pictures of yourself and post it on a personal website or email it to someone you didn’t want to know where you live. You are secretly emailing them your EXACT location without you knowing it.
Let me illustrate. Here is a picture of the Chrysler building I took with my iPhone in NYC.
Innocent looking picture, right? I just emailed it to myself from my phone and uploaded it to my website. Now if you download it to your computer it will reveal some hidden information.
Hidden in the JPEGS metadata is the GPS coordinates of where I took the picture. Which easily can get mapped to Google Maps.
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Now lets say that you post a picture of yourself to a website where you wish your location to be a secret, a person can simply download the JPEG taken from your smartphone and know exactly where you live.
Creepy, right? The only way to sort of wash this information is to run the image through an image editing program and change the image format – lets say to a GIF of PNG. Or find the location services option on your phone and shut it off.
Put on your tin foil hats people! Now, me being the most paranoid person out there I don’t have much to fear leaving my GPS on, but for people out there who are a little sketchy – you may want to turn that radio off.
