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.'"

Comments

Duh.

[_0xd0ad]

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

Re:Duh.

[_0xd0ad]

I might as well also point out that 4chan strips the EXIF data from uploaded images for exactly this reason.

Re:Duh.

[_0xd0ad]

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.

Re:Duh.

[_0xd0ad]

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.

Re:Duh.

[Hultis]

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.

Privacy disinterest come home to roost

[dtmos]

The lack of interest in personal privacy is probably the 21st Century's social movement that most surprised me. If someone had told me in 1991 that in 20 years people would want to publish their personal photographs to the world, and announce to everyone literate when they would be out of town, I would have said they were nuts: They're obviously risky behaviors in which no thinking person would engage.

How wrong I was.

Re:Privacy disinterest come home to roost

[ThatsMyNick]

mogrify -strip *.jpg will do!

Re:Privacy disinterest come home to roost

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

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.

Re:Privacy disinterest come home to roost

[sglewis100]

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.

Researchers?

[93 Escort Wagon]

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.

They may be calling themselves "researchers", but it's pretty obvious they're just a bunch of really creepy dudes.