This article is based on an old newspaper article, but it caught my eye when Michael Yon put up a related story on Facebook. On August 11 of this year the New York Times posted an article about something called a geotag. A geotag is a bit of data embedded in a photograph that provides the longitude and latitude of where a photo is taken.
The article reports:
"Security experts and privacy advocates have recently begun warning about the potential dangers of geotags, which are embedded in photos and videos taken with GPS-equipped smartphones and digital cameras. Because the location data is not visible to the casual viewer, the concern is that many people may not realize it is there; and they could be compromising their privacy, if not their safety, when they post geotagged media online."
This is particularly significant to members of our armed forces serving overseas who may post pictures online for their families at home.
The article also points out how posting pictures on social networks showing expensive cars or possessions can put you at risk for theft:
"Moreover, since multimedia sites like Twitter and YouTube have user-friendly application programming interfaces, or A.P.I.'s, someone with a little knowledge about writing computer code can create a program to search for geotagged photos in a systematic way. For example, they can search for those accompanied with text like "on vacation" or those taken in a specified neighborhood.
""Any 16 year-old with basic programming skills can do this," said Gerald Friedland, a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. He and a colleague, Robin Sommer, wrote a paper, "Cybercasing the Joint: On the Privacy Implications of Geotagging," which they presented on Tuesday at a workshop in Washington during the Advanced Computing Systems Association's annual conference on security.
"The paper provides three examples of so-called cybercasing that use photos posted on Twitter and Craigslist and a homemade video on YouTube.
"By looking at geotags and the text of posts, Mr. Sommer said, "you can easily find out where people live, what kind of things they have in their house and also when they are going to be away.""
Social networking is a great thing--I truly appreciate being able to turn on my computer and see current pictures of my grandchildren. However, like anything else, social networks need to be used carefully and cautiously so that people with less-than-honorable intentions do not take advantage of those of us who are simply sharing family pictures.
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