Security Warning: phones and cameras with geotagging using GPS

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At least on smart-phones, the default setting for geotagging is "Off" - that means that someone made a conscious effort to geotag their photos. And one more thing, about tracking one's location from "zee government" - all "they" need is your phone to be turned on (and your number, of course) to track you with simple cell network triangulation...
 
This came up on another shooting forum I frequent in regards to hunting images. I have an Android that is fairly easy to figure out. My gps has been turned off for a while. Remember, all this geotagging is to make your life easier.
 
I don't use my phone to photograph anything. When your phone is on your movements are being tracked using tower locations. That information is stored and can be retrieved. I have a smartphone but most of the time it's off.
 
Some has said that privacy is dead. I have to disagree. You have to continue to fight for it or else it will slip away. More accurately it will be taken. Some things we can do little about. Large companies track our buying habits for example or "cookies" keeping tabs on what websites we visit. If I pay with a credit card at a store I get an email from a completely different company a few days later, advertising the same thing at a lower price. They sell the information about our buying habits back and forth.

We can resist some of that if we want to. But the more we let slip away the more it becomes "normal" for our privacy to be violated. "I have done nothing wrong so I have nothing to hide" becomes a mantra an excuse that gives cops and such the "right" to violate your privacy. You may have done nothing wrong, but you do have something to protect.

Things like this make identity theft easier.

In Calif. last few years a group of CHP officers began stopping attractive women at random for various "violations", like texting while driving or minor traffic. They asked to see their phones to check. The women, handed over their phones and the officers searched them and downloaded racy or sexy photos of the women and her friends. They then shared the pics with other officers. For a year or two this became a trend among law enforcement officers in Ca. With competitions between officers in differing departments. It was discovered, lawsuits and firings took place, etc.

We all need to take measure to protect what is ours and to oppose the taking away of rights from others. We have to decide what's appropriate for our lives.

If we donate time or money to a legal political cause...the political police don't need to know that, or use it against me.

tipoc
 
Thank you, Oddjob, for bringing this to the attention of everyone who didn't know their cell phone was constantly spying on them in yet one more ingenious way.

In my case, I intentionally have geotagging turned "on" since I use the geotags to position the pictures (for reconstruction of the scene, etc.). If someone on this site wants to go to all the trouble to search my uploaded pictures for things they would like to steal, download the picture, read the geotag, figure out where I live, drive all the way over here, wait until nobody is home and then burgle my house, then so be it. Just be alert for the alarm system, the cameras and the part-ocelot attack cat. They will walk past several laptops and a server farm that are far more valuable (not to mention as portable, less traceable and more easily pawned) than any of the guns I own.

The most valuable things I've got that have been photographed and posted on this site are some WWII-vintage Nambu rounds and some boxes of Korean War vintage .45 ACP cartridges. They're in my garage, in my reloading cabinet, second shelf from the bottom, on the left, in the red and buff colored boxes, respectively.
 
It surprises me how many people just use their smartphone straight out of the box leaving it mostly configured to factory setting. First thing I do is go through and try to understand every little setting that I can find. Then turn off or disable, or better yet delete, every function that I don't find usefull.

The beauty of these devices is how customizable they are. You can change almost everything.
 
Tracking your cell phone is a two edged sword, it can be clearly used for evil if tracking you as an individual, but as a non-personally identifiable aggregate things like the traffic reports on Google Maps rock. Houston/Harris County has spent millions on its TransStar system which tracks the RFID toll road tags along the freeway. Its crap compared to Google Maps -- half the cameras are typically broken, traffic status updates are 5-30 minutes old, and it has no info at all about access road or ramp traffic backups. Did you agree to be "tracked" on the freeways when you signed up for a toll road EZ-TAG? Not a choice. At least you can turn off your cell phone location service, or turn the phone off.

Google Maps costs the taxpayers nothing and is way better showing near real-time traffic status anywhere there is a significant number of cell phones on the road. I give up something by driving around with my lame Android phone GPS enabled, but What I get back in the form of traffic status more than makes up for it to me!
 
It's not just cell towers. If you have GPS turned off you can still be tracked if you have Wi-Fi enabled based on the wi-fi networks that your phone finds in the area. At least on Android. Even if you have the location setting set to Power Saving AND have wi-fi enabled, you can be tracked to within a less than 50' in most places. Now whether that would result in photos being geotagged with that approximate location, I have no idea. I have location turned off on my phone and my standalone camera doesn't have GPS. Facebook, last time I checked, stripped all the geotag info off any uploaded images and I thought that most forum/bbs software had the same option. It doesn't help with linked images, though.

Matt
 
Odd Job said:
snip...
If you want to strip all the data out of a folder of images on your computer, you can use a tool such as ExifPurge.
It will take everything out, even the camera/phone details, and save the cleaned files in a new folder.
Click to expand...

Great little program, but make sure you don't install it from any source but the ExifPurge website, otherwise there is a chance that the site has added tracking viruses to the file. CNET is notorious for doing just that. http://www.exifpurge.com/
 
I use BatchPurifier on Windows (work computer). I forget what I use on Linux at home.

There are many reasons I would want location and heading when taking a picture, camera settings, aperture, exposure, date, time, etc in my pictures. I just clean them before I share them.

Mike

PS. What are people using for image hosting? I want a public folder type access with direct URLs to files (like the Dropbox Public Folder original functionality). Years ago they stopped supporting Public Folders it (you had to manually create the Public Folder and there was no documentation). They also dropped cryptographic salt in file names. Soon they are going to end all serving from Public Folders (if they have not done it yet--supposed to be this month).
 
The modern smartphone puts all the knowledge accumulated by mankind in the palm of your hand.

I use mine to post pictures of my cats and what I had for lunch. :)
 
Just checked, it was turned on on my phone, but I looked at the details and the addresses were all wrong. Doesn't seem to be very accurate at least in my case.
 
Surely there is an app (or someone could make one) that attaches a selected set of coordinates, say the Governor's mansion in California, or the Brady headquarters
 
I knew about the geotagging situation, but what caught me off guard was my Android was automatically backing up all my photos to Google's cloud servers.

I only realized this when I started getting notices that my Google server space was full and they were trying to sell me more space. What a pain it was to figure out how to and then delete all those images. :mad:
 
Privacy... in the modern world is a myth...

That said, I take lots and lots of pics since I'm a full time fishing guide - and my fishing reports are posted on three or four different sites, then manage to go worldwide... They're my only source of advertising since I dropped my last magazine ad three or four years ago - and those reports, along with the pics do generate a fair amount of business from folks headed my way. I was aware of geo-tagging some time back and very carefully make sure my pics aren't tagged (if you're a fishing guide displaying exactly where you were isn't a very good idea -even when you're twenty or thirty miles back into the saltwater Everglades...).

The good news for everyone here is that I've taken an oath not to post any of my fish pics on THR....
 
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