Uploading photos can give strangers your location

August 12, 2010 |
Valor

Uploading photographs or videos from your smart phone or digital camera to the internet has become as common place as taking a breathe.  Photographs are shared with family, friends and strangers displaying moments in your life.  You share photos and videos of your pets, your children, that weekend in Tijuana, or that wonderful dessert you baked that has all the flavor and absolutely no calories.
When you upload those photos or videos to the internet, you may be sharing more than special moments.  You may be unwillingly giving a complete stranger a way to find where you work, live, and play through geotagging.
Many smart phones and digital cameras have built in Global Positioning Systems (GPS) chips.  When a photo or video is taken from these devices, it is embedded with data that stores the longitude, latitude, and sometimes altitude, bearing and distance of where the picture was taken.  This data is not seen in the photo but is stored in the metadata and can be read by devices or websites with software that has the capability to process the information.  In other words, geotagging can tell the user the location of the content of a given picture or video.
Geotagging has become a topic of debate for people that have concerns about their safety and privacy as well as for people that see the benefits of  the application.
Smart phones and digital cameras that have GPS have a means by which the geotagging feature can be disabled.  The procedure for turning off geotagging is not the same on every device and can usually be found within layers and layers of the menu.  Beware that disabling this function on your device may cause other features to become inoperable.
To read more about geotagging go to;
The New York Times – Web Photos that Reveal Secrets
MSN – Geotagging Goes Mainstream
What is geotagging