Slashdot Mirror
How People Broadcast Their Locations Without Meaning To
wjousts writes "Smartphones include geotagging features that many people aren't aware of, MIT's Technology Review reports. And it's not just in the obvious places: 'For example, by looking at the location metadata stored with pictures posted through one man's anonymous Twitter account, the researchers were able to pinpoint his likely home address. From there, by cross-referencing this location with city records, they found his name. Using that information, the researchers went on to find his place of work, his wife's name, and information about his children.'"
I might as well also point out that 4chan strips the EXIF data from uploaded images for exactly this reason.
Most people don't intend to post pics with geo-information tagged in it. Cameras starting adding the data as the "default" option a couple years ago, and no one (except nerds) took notice. So now we have millions of pictures floating around with lat/long data encoded in them. I couldn't believe cameras chose to embed the data automatically -- that's where the real disbelief is. Humans probably would turn it off if they knew it was on.
mogrify -strip *.jpg will do!
Not to forget, Facebook strips EXIF too.
True, although Facebook has always stripped EXIF. 4chan didn't use to strip EXIF.
Facebook also compresses the images all to shit, too, although they recently made it possible to let people download a higher-quality version.
You do realize 4chan's Alexa Traffic Rank is 632, right? Compare this to Slashdot, which is ranked 1296. 4chan isn't exactly the well-kept secret some people want to think of it as.