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How People Broadcast Their Locations Without Meaning To

Posted by Soulskill on from the your-face-is-broadcasting-an-ip-address dept.

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.'"

5 of 106 comments (clear)

  1. Duh. by _0xd0ad · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Anyone who's been to 4chan should know this.

    1. Re:Duh. by wjousts · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Considering the proportion of people that have been on 4chan versus the general population, that's not particularly helpful.

    2. Re:Duh. by _0xd0ad · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Considering the proportion of people that have been on 4chan versus the people who'd publicly admit to it, it might be more helpful than you'd expect.

  2. Re:Privacy disinterest come home to roost by thePowerOfGrayskull · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Surely Microsoft have conclusively proven that most people value convenience far more than security?

    The big problem is that companies add these 'convenience' features with no warning and no easy way to remove them. Having to manually strip exif data from every image is painful, to say the least.

    The big problem is more that most consumers don't realize that they're giving up security when they give up privacy - as with GP's example, telling the world when their house is vacant, and even giving the world their regular out-of-house patterns.

  3. Re:Privacy disinterest come home to roost by sglewis100 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    Oh please. People check into FourSquare or Facebook religiously, and tweet that they are leaving for vacation, and then come home and post pictures for the world to see. The problem isn't that they are unaware their location can be tracked. It's that they are proud to broadcast it. Actually problem is the wrong word for me to use... they don't see it as a problem.