Ask Marian

[#1]

If you are, like my friend Adrian, an iPhone user, you enjoy taking and uploading photos with this device. He recently found that some of his Tumblr photos were appearing on another Tumblr website with links to the geotagging information in the image. What this means is when you take a digital photo using the Apple software, it records your physical location on the planet as part of the data in the file. And using this data, a third party could map your location (when the photo was taken) and find you. Or at least get awfully close to where you were at that time.

Consider the parents of this infant. When they posted their child's photo on the internet, they didn't realize a screen-scraping program would repost the photo to another site. Nor could they have realized that by clicking the link called "Where is My iPhone?" a map pops up to show where the child's image was taken. Or these teenagers.

Geotagging is a great techy feature, helpful for mapping vacation photos to a trip and keeping things in order. You've found a gorgeous scenic picnic spot in the mountains? With geotagging in your digital photos, you'll never forget how to return to that spot in the future. But if you have a secret swimming hole, be careful about posting snaps of it online, since you may be giving the exact location away to thousands of strangers who will ruin the secret for you.

Here's an article with information about turning off the feature of geotagging and sharing your location in your photo. If you use other photo applications and sites, you'll want to find the instructions for each one to be sure you're managing your data correctly.

Keeping things in perspective, I don't mean to imply that by posting photos to a sharing site that strangers will pop up on your doorstep. Rather, when you are putting private information out on the internet, you lose much of the control of that information and it's better to understand that risk than to proceed blindly.

[#2]

Interesting way to find people.

[#3]

Hi! I'm the "Adrian" listed above. I'm so glad I came to Marian to help me figure out this problem, more for the safety of the online community than myself. While it is "creepy" to know that someone had pinpointed my apartment, simply based on an iPhone photo that I took of my puppy in the living room, I was more disturbed by the implication for families. Imagine mom taking a picture of the kids at the bus stop on the first day of school. She posts the picture to the family Tumblog (click here for an explanation of a "Tumblog"), and suddenly her picture is reposted with a link to a GoogleMap showing the bus stop where she dropped off the kids. Since this process is automated (at least on this site specifically), it could potentially be run on other sites like Facebook, Flickr, etc, provided your phone's camera inserts location information into the picture data. 

While the above is a worst case scenario, I thought people should be aware of the phenomenon and at least exercise some caution when posting photos. I called Apple, and their best advice was to go to "General>Settings>Location Services" and turn Location Services off before you take a photo. This will make certain that the geotagging data isn't included with that particular picture only. Instructions vary for other devices, so check with your carrier. This seems to be the best (albeit annoying) solution until software comes out that lets consumers choose to opt out of geotagging specific applications and files.

Thanks again to Marian for helping me investigate the issue! I hope you learned something valuable - that you can never be too careful when you put content online. 

[#4]

Thanks for making us aware,I have heard certain camera manufacturers have this ability in their Digital cameras.