Cristina Parker loves taking pictures with her smart phone.
"I like to take a lot of photos of my dog and post them on twitter. Um, I think she's really cute. Also my friends and family," Parker said.
But one day she got an ominous tweet from the website IcanstalkU.com telling her they know where she lives.
"I thought it was a little scary," she said. "They were accurate to my location from my house. So my immediate response was, 'what happened, how do you know where I am?'"
Turns out, Parker's photos contained GPS information called "Geotags," embedded by her smart phone.
Every time she posted a photo online that she took with her phone, she was inadvertently giving out her whereabouts.
"And the location can be as accurate as plus/minus one meter, depending on the reception of the GPS signal of the device you're using," Gerald Friedland said.
Gerald Friedland of Berkeley's International Computer Science Institute co-authored a study on the privacy implications of geotagging. The findings: most people had no idea what they were posting online.
"There's enough information out there that you can actually track people and do potential harm to them," he said.
And that's exactly what Larry Pesce wants to warn people about. He co-founded IcanstalkU.com to alert people after he discovered a photo of his child revealed her location. And it can happen to others.
"For example, let's take a picture of your nice brand new 50 inch plasma TV at your house and you're now sharing the location of that TV and an hour later you're posting a photograph from a 711 and now we know that you're not home," Pesce said.
In addition to potential robberies, Pesce says geotagged photos open up the possibility of stalking and domestic violence. And you don't have to be some expert to get the information.
"Just about anybody that can operate a computer and do a few right clicks could find out someone's location," he said.
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Now, we love Twitter and posting photos of our lunch, however, we don't feel that enough people realize what kind of data they are posting, albeit inadvertantly. By posting this information, they are allowing their movements to be recorded and analyized by anyone: from a government to a nosy neighbor. After analyzing your photos, someone could find out:
Where you live
Who else lives there
Your commuting patterns
Where you go for lunch each day
Who you go to lunch with
Why you and your attactive co-worker really like to visit a certain nice restaurant on a regular basis
Among many other things! I think that most people if they realized they were posting exactly where they were each time they clicked "send" on their phone to post a photo to Twitter they would stop doing it at all! Which is why we are doing this: To make people aware that they are posting this information when they are sending out photos and giving them options on how to disable that functionality. By making this information public, we are attempting to get enough exposure to the problem so that we can start to curb its continued use.
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Since 2005, all cell phones and handheld devices like Blackberry, have been required by law to be geotagged.
1984 - Spirit
