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Please take the time to view this video. At the end they'll tell you how to set your phone so you don't run this risk! Social networking can be risky.
This applies to all mobile and smartphones that can take pictures, and have GPS, mapping, or location capabilities.
Everyone with a camera phone needs to watch this, and then be sure to share with family and friends.
Its REALLY important info, about what posting photos online, that were taken with your cell phones can do! Most people are not aware that there is a tremendous amount of information, referred to as metadata, attached to every digital photo you take. Its not like the old days. You need to be aware of the technology out there these days so beware.
If you have children or grandchildren you NEED to watch this.
What these sites fail to tell you is that when you use many website, like City-Data for example, the meta data and geo tags are stripped out. If you donwload the picture you don't get access to any of that information.
I believe Facebook works the same way.
Also of note: If you post process (edit) your images on a computer before you post online, when you go into the file and "save for web" (or similar command), there is usually an option you can check off to save or not save the metadata in the image when you save the web copy of it. If you're not posting directly from the phone, this is a good way of ensuring no data is in the online copy.
I see FAR more people willingly giving out personal info in the text part of their Facebook and Tweet posts than I do in photos. My favorite is when their full name is their profile name, and they post, "We'll be out of town for a week on vacation - Wahoo!".... which to some translates into, "Come take my big screen TVs now".
What these sites fail to tell you is that when you use many website, like City-Data for example, the meta data and geo tags are stripped out. If you donwload the picture you don't get access to any of that information.
I believe Facebook works the same way.
Sorry, that is false information. I just downloaded (right click "save image as") and checked one of the pictures in my album on C-D, and the metadata is there.
Obviously FB doesn't either because it was FB images that the reporter used to find and surprise the mom that didn't want to be interviewed on camera.
Sorry, that is false information. I just downloaded (right click "save image as") and checked one of the pictures in my album on C-D, and the metadata is there.
Obviously FB doesn't either because it was FB images that the reporter used to find and surprise the mom that didn't want to be interviewed on camera.
I've pulled pics from C-D in the past and found EXIF data in them (date taken and camera model info).
FB has been stripping EXIF data for a number of years. If you read the article that goes with that (quite old) video, the pics were found on photo bucket.
If you are concerned about this there is couple ways to avoid it other than turning the feature off in the camera. Personally I think it's great feature for future reference, I have thousands of old photos here and would love to know where some of them were taken. Manufactures need to do a better job of informing their customers about features like this and by default they should be turned off.
Using something like Irfanview or Exifer you can edit this information or even do entire folders of images in batch mode. In addition to that the "Save for web" option of most image editors *usually* strips the metadata. This is not for security purposes but to save a few kilobytes in file size.
Sorry, that is false information. I just downloaded (right click "save image as") and checked one of the pictures in my album on C-D, and the metadata is there.
*test* Here is a Geo-tagged photo.
Tell me where it was taken.
I also just downloaded a friends photo from Facebook. Nothing, not even the exif data, was there. So Facebook does strip this stuff out. Probably didn't when this video was taken.
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