Pictures taken with smartphones may contain geotag data

Thank you for the info! Makes you think twice before uploading photos online, especially facebook.

Although I'm safe because my smart phone is smarter than I am.

Good info to have, DrewDad. Thanks for posting that.

fair enough....


but... um... all it takes is someone driving by a house to see if there are kids there too. fear mongering kinda sucks, though I understand... i just dont see the immediate threat as any higher than any other activity in life.

yes, someone can find your address online w/ just a picture. I think that is really above and beyond what should be allowed when it comes to privacy.We should be notified of that immediately, not through someones sleuthing. Companies should be honest about data collecting and i do not know why it isnt illegal already.

But, you can do the same thing with a band sticker . Seriously.
People have these all over their cars. They know the name of the child, their number and what school they go to. AND.. they have enough visual info to pass off as someone who may know the kid ,year make model of car, color, specific body damage, even house address, color..etc... voila.. just as much info as someone found online... yet its on the back of your car.


If someone sits on a street for 2 hours right after school lets out, they see where the kids live and how many other people there are in the house.

I see photo posting as equivalent to other every day things. Im glad the news made a story about it, it is something we should ALL know ..how our information is available. But to call it a big threat.. I dont agree. But thats just my opinion.

I agree that it isn't a big threat.... and that it could actually help in many cases -- like if your kid was lost.

I just don't like the idea that the information is so easily retrieved by anyone. I don't have a smartphone and would probably never use a camera on one anyway but knowing this would especially keep me from doing so.

Remember your "naked kids" thread, shewolf? Weren't there something like 20 posts and 20,000 looks? That freaked me out.

oh YEAH i remember that one. it was... disgusting. I am still shocked, even though Im sort of .. not ya know.

I dont understand why this info is so readily available and there is no warning, no communication ..NOTHING to the phone owner.

I dont think i will ever get a smart phone either. I have a phone now that lets me connect to internet for google maps and such, but it runs on java. I only have that one so I dont get lost on the way to a job.

If I post any pictures on f/b they have come off my camera so no info there.

but yeah. I think that should be illegal, or at least.. there should be something to sign some where that tells you all about information sharing on your phone.

I'm not really one for fear mongering, but I think this is just something people need to be aware of. That the "anonymous" picture they're posting could be a lot less anonymous than they're aware of.

i agree with you.
Sorry if it sounded like i was pointing the finger at YOU saying you were the point of mongering.

I got that feeling from the tv segment itself. Just the underlining feeling of ' oh my god this is really dangerous' when in the big picture it isnt worse than anything else.. BUT, it is sneaky, deceptive and manipulating behavior from whom ever created that program. Whether it be the phone manufacturer itself, the program manufacturer of the photo sharing, Facebook.. who cares. Someone is giving away info with out telling people and that is just a load of crap and i do not see why it is even OK for them to do so with out disclosing.

I don't necessarily agree with that description. It's a new feature, and people aren't used to it yet, IMO.

Yeah.

I have a question, not sure if this segment answered it (not captioned).

On my smartphone, (Blackberry Bold), there is a row of icons under the "veiwfinder." Second from left is a compass rose icon. Click on that and it launches GPS -- "Finding current location." Then when it's located, the compass rose changes into a pin. Click on that, and you get "GeoTagging Options: show overlay" or "turn OFF." I turned it off back when I first got it.

Does that mean it's off-off? That I don't have to worry? Or can savvy folk still get the info from the photo?

http://www.blackberrytoday.com/articles/2008/12/2008-12-11-Tip-BlackBerry-Boldly.html

Riiight, I get how to officially turn it on and off. I'm just wondering if there is any sort of residual information that someone with know-how could find. (For example, even if I delete something on my computer, if I then turn it over to someone with the knowledge of how to do it, they could find it back.)

For what it's worth, I just checked my iPhone and found that the "geo services" option is turned off. I know I haven't touched this setting, so it has to be the default. Contrary to what the NBC story suggests, users have to know about this feature and expose themselves to its risks willingly. At least that's true for the iPhone. If you have an Android phone, or a Blackberry, or something else, I'd be curious to hear what their settings are.

It would take fraud by the manufacturer, or at least a serious bug. The tag won't be on the picture unless your phone deliberately writes it there. This is different from the logically-but-not-physically deleted file.

OK, sorry. The procedure I found didn't seem to match what you described, so I was wondering if it had to be disabled in multiple places. (To me, as a computer geek, "show overlay" is not the same as "Geotagging: Disabled.")

I'm not sure exactly what your question is, though.... Are you asking if your phone retains GPS data, whether there is still geotag data saved with an image even though geotagging is disabled, or whether pictures already taken will retain their geotag data, or something else?

From what I've read, it's on by default in Android.

It was enabled on my Android 2.2 phone.

Here's a tool to read the geotag ("EXIF data"): http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/

I'd say test a pic from your phone and see what it has.

Also, apparently some photo sites (such as Flickr) will strip the EXIF data from uploaded photos, unless you tell it otherwise.

Correction: "turned off" should read "turned off for pictures". The option is turned on for a number of other applications.

That sucks.