How your photos may be revealing your address to strangers

We discuss the potential privacy ramifications that your photos may cause, and talk about how they could give away your address to strangers on the Internet.

If you’ve never heard of terms such as EXIF data, Meta information or geo-tags, then you not realise that the photos you snap with your smartphone, or in some cases your digital camera, may give away a lot more information than you intended. Something that could be a serious problem if you share those photos online.

When you take a photo, the photo itself can contain a lot more information than just the pixels that make up the image. Most photos also contain hidden attributes known as metadata, or in the case of photos, EXIF data.

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EXIF data is information about your photo. It’s hidden in the sense that merely opening the photo doesn’t show this information, but it’s hardly secret data either, since you can easily see it once you know how. For example, in Windows, all you need to do it right click the photo, select Properties and then Details to see what EXIF data is available for that photo. There’s loads of apps and websites that can show you the data too. EXIF data typically records basic information about a photo, such as what device took it, the camera settings, the date the photo was taken and so forth.

But all smartphones – and an increasing number of digital cameras – can connect to the Internet. This brings about another EXIF value. Location.

This means that if you take a photo with a device that has the ability to connect to the Internet – be it a smartphone or camera – there’s the possibility that each photo you take will carry with it the exact co-ordinates of where you were when you took the photo if that feature is enabled. These are known as geo-tags.

These coordinates can be put into a service such as Google Maps which will give the exact location, often accurate to a handful of metres. In most cases, accurate enough to give away your street address.

This presents an obvious privacy ramification. For example a photo taken in your house of your child and shared on a blog could give a stranger visiting your blog access to your home address. The same applies to photos taken at a school or daycare center.

It’s worth noting that this does not apply to photos uploaded to many of the top social networking platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. That’s because these sites remove much of the EXIF information when they’re uploaded.

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However EXIF information will typically remain intact outside the realms of social media, so if, for example, you’re posting from your own blog, or you upload a photo to a forum or online community, the chances are that the EXIF information will be available to anyone who can see the photo.

Of course there are a number of ways you can stop this from happening. Most smartphones for example, will have an option to turn off the location geo-tag in the camera app settings. Or you can remove the information after you’ve taken the photo. For example, in Windows, you can right click the photo, select Properties, then Details and then select the Remove Properties and Personal Information option.

So don’t get caught out. If you’re posting photos online taken on a device that can connect to the Internet and you don’t want people to see the location of that photo, make sure that geo-tagging is turned off, or you remove the location information before you upload.