When you take a picture using your smart phone, tiny bits of metadata or tags are stored on it. The data contains the longitude and latitude of your smart phones location which it gets from your GPS locator. And when you post your pictures to image repositories like Flickr and TwitPic that data goes with it.
Why is this important?
Criminals can use certain software to extract the data and derive the exact place where the photo was taken. Now this might not be a big deal if it’s just one or two photos. How about family photos of a trip to Greece? Maybe not too big of a deal, but what if you are posting daily photos of your normal local routine? For example: going grocery shopping your child is just too cute not to take a picture or you are out in the yard with the kids swimming in the pool, maybe at the gym or going for a walk you take a pictures of the fall foliage or the spring buds on the trees. How about you just bought a 52 inch plasma 3D and you quickly take a photo at the store with your wallet empty and a smile from ear to ear? Maybe you just opened your first bank account and your mom is so proud she took of photo of you at the bank. These are all harmless pictures that we post on the internet for our family and friends, Twitter followers, Facebook friends, and MySpace friends, right? Well the bad guys are looking too.
Let’s take the trip to Greece example. If you are posting these photos daily on social media sites like Twitter and Flickr chances are you are still away on a vacation. Not a wise decision. Bad guys, if they have used previous geotags from other photos of yours to determine where you live can now take their time stealing everything in your house.
If you compile each of the other photo scenarios listed above you can deduce a local basic profile of that individual. What these photos do lack is consistency and times – in other words, how often do you visit the local places and at what times.
Now before I scare the bejesus out of everyone chances are criminals aren’t looking at everyone Tom, Dick and Harry and the average Joe’s photographs throughout the world. The serious criminals are most likely targeting high profile celebrities and corporate CEO’s just out of sheer economics which should put a lot of executive protection and security professionals on a higher alert than usual especially if these high profile clients are using social media.
If the bad guys have serious intent to commit a very hefty felony like kidnapping, they’ll start to
“tail” or place surveillance on the individual to establish a defined routine, of course, our jobs as executive protection professionals is to detect the surveillance.
How do I shut off Geotagging?
In every smart phone there is an option to turn the geotagging off. Listed below are directions for the iPhone, Blackberry and Droid.
Blackberry
In general Blackberry smart phone does it the right way in that you can only turn on geotagging if your BlackBerry device has an internal GPS receiver.
For the Droid:
1. Open the Camera app.
2. Press Menu.
3. Tap Settings.
4. Tap Store location.
5. Change the setting to Off.
iPhone:
Click Settings. Then, choose General. From the General list, choose Location Services. The Location Services menu lists every app on your iPhone that has location tracking ability. It’s a good idea to review these and to turn off the ones you don’t want keeping tabs on you. Turn the camera’s location setting to Off.
If Geotagging is so inherently bad why is it on my phone in the first place? Well, someone, somewhere said let’s give geotagging ability in case anyone would want to know where those vacation picture was taken.
Facebook
You should check your Facebook privacy settings. To get to your Facebook privacy settings go to Account (top right on Facebook) and click privacy settings from the drop down menu. Rule of thumb is to have general privacy settings set to Friends Only. Facebook does a very decent job giving you the ability to manage who sees what including photos. If you needed to you can set your photos you posted to Facebook to be seen only be certain friends and family or only by you. Lastly to make your Facebook profile more secure go to Account Settings->Settings->Account Security and check the box secure browsing https.
