Smartphone Photos Can Reveal Private Information
Tuesday, April 19th, 2011According to a report by WSOTV:
Smartphone users and their children could be targets of a new kind of stalking without ever knowing it.
Many parents don’t realize that pictures taken with smartphones and uploaded to the Internet could give a predator all the information needed for stalking or even an abduction.
Police Detective Walt Suarez said it’s a frightening prospect.
Eyewitness News met Suarez in the department’s computer crime lab, where he showed how easily hidden information can be revealed. As an example, he used a picture he took at the beach. With a few clicks, the picture revealed the kind of phone used to take it, the time and date it was taken and finally the latitude and longitude of where the photo was taken.
“It takes me right to the Outer Banks,” Suarez said. “That’s where I was when I took the picture.”
When Channel 9 used the same technique to find the exact location where a picture of Mary Bennett Riddick’s daughter was taken, her mind started racing.
“Something bad could happen and you had no idea that information was out there,” Riddick said.
It’s a completely different threat than what many parents and even police detectives have traditionally dealt with. It used to be that predators surfed social networking sites, posing as children and striking up conversations in order to ferret out information about where a child might live or play.
But with such detailed information hidden in pictures uploaded from smartphones, none of that is necessary. Pictures uploaded to sites like Twitter, Craigslist or Photobucket can be a treasure trove for the wrong kind of person.
“This person can now sit in their own home and they can surf pictures, find the victim and decide today’s the day,” Suarez said. “That person’s going to go out and take this child.”
It’s a sobering lesson for parents who never thought twice about using their smartphones as cameras.
“I had no idea that it showed you exactly the location of where you were, anytime you took a picture and sent it from your smartphone,” parent Al Riddick said.
The good news is that there is a simple solution. Smartphone users can turn off the GPS function on their cameras. They can still take and upload pictures, but they won’t have GPS information on them.
