The Hidden Security Risk of Geotags

pickens writes "The NY Times reports that security experts and privacy advocates have begun warning consumers about the potential dangers of geotags, which are embedded in photos and videos taken with GPS-equipped smartphones and digital cameras. By looking at geotags of uploaded photos, 'you can easily find out where people live, what kind of things they have in their house and also when they are going to be away,' says one security expert. Because the location data is not visible to the casual viewer, the concern is that many people may not realize it is there; and they could be compromising their privacy, if not their safety, when they post geotagged media online."

Comments

Re:I was just wondering about that

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Might want to take a look at jhead. jhead -purejpg will, as the name suggests, strip everything that isn't actually the image.

Re:This is why...

[odies]

I always use IrfanView to pre-process my pictures before uploading them anywhere. You need to do that anyway (original pictures are usually huge 4000+ pixels wide and forums usually limit you to less than 1280px). When you're saving the image, it shows check boxes to remove all extra information from the pictures (usually camera model and shooting options and so on). Easy. And yeah, it's an awesome and light image viewer and you can edit images too.

Re:I was just wondering about that

[betterunixthanunix]

Or, you can just use ImageMagick:

$ mogrify -strip image.jpg

Re:ImageMagick and remove metadata

[MechaStreisand]

Yup, and it recompresses the image when you do so. See suggestions here for ways of stripping it without recompressing.