Do you take photos with your smartphone and post them online?
Innocent photos of your children or snapshots of family get-togethers that you want to remember are common on social media sites.
However, these photos pose a serious and dangerous privacy risk.
Thieves and criminals can find the exact location where your photos were taken, via the GPS on your smartphone – whether that’s your child’s bedroom or your favorite restaurant.
This security concern has been around for quite a while – but privacy breaches will continue, as long as geo-tracking is enabled by default on your family’s photos.
The software behind the photos includes geo-tags, according to Deep Medhi, a computer science professor at UMKC.
These are geographical tags that store where and when the photo was taken, similar to the type of technology used in GPS devices.
Your smartphone automatically stores the location where the photos were taken, whether it is at a local park, your child’s day care center, or even your own home.
Anyone can easily translate these geo-tags through browser add-ons that are completely free to download. The add-ons or apps turn the geo-tags into mapped locations to make it easier for human eyes to determine the location.
Technology is continually developing, and privacy is an ongoing problem – particularly for social media sites like Facebook. If you’re not careful, you could be giving criminals all the information they need to harm you
and your family. For now, make sure your GPS settings are set to the level of control that you want them, and be careful when posting pictures online. It takes just a free browser add-on to get more information than just the image shows.
How Do you Protect Yourself?
You can disable your geo-tags on your phones settings and any other social website using their control settings. If you need help trying to figuring it out, let us know and we can help you. I would easily post a “how to” but every device is different and every software is always updating and changing. Its just easier for us to help you right then and there.
If you still need help disabling the geo tagging or you are not sure, give us a contact or a call 🙂 We would be happy to help you. Better safe than sorry.
