Be careful with your smartphone pictures...

[poopgiggle]

This is one of those computer security topics that can have real-world impact for people so I thought I'd post about it.

http://www.social-engineer.org/soci...mart-phones-making-social-engineering-easier/

From the article:

Most phones when used for taking pictures will embed certain data in the meta-tag. Meta data is often used by software to help process the picture and open it correctly. Yet there is so much space this is also often used to store the photographer’s name, date and other juicy bits of info about the picture.

One of the juiciest bits is geo-location. Yes the age of the smart phone has opened up this flaw and allows a person to see the exact location of an individual when that picture was taking. Smart phones actual embed the longitude and latitude of the location in the meta data of the picture.

Then when the user (you) posts it to twitter, facebook, and the world begins to awe at your photographic prowess malicious social engineers are finding out the location seeing if you are near home, near a good spot to be abducted, profiling you for id theft or home invasion… pick your poison and although I sound sarcastic, this is very serious.

Since this is a gun forum, and lots of us are taking smartphone pictures of valuable firearms, people need to know about this and protect themselves accordingly. It's easy to say "well breaking into my house is a good way to get a HOT LEAD INJECTION," but a smart thief is going to wait until there's no one home.

I was screwing around with this and I was able to find the home address of at least one member on here by looking at pictures of a gun they had uploaded. I'm not posting who it was, but I'm PMing them to give them a heads up.

 

[MaddSkillz]

Thanks for the heads up. The link below might be useful to some.

How to disable geo-tagging on iPhone

 

[KillShot]

Good read. Thanks for sharing.

 

[NikatKimber]

I have made a practice of "resizing" by taking a screenshot of the picture in a viewer at the size I want it, and saving that via paint. Not more Metadata there.

 

[poopgiggle]

Thanks for the heads up. The link below might be useful to some.

How to disable geo-tagging on iPhone

The article I linked also has instructions for Blackberry and Android if you're of that persuasion.

 

[poopgiggle]

I have made a practice of "resizing" by taking a screenshot of the picture in a viewer at the size I want it, and saving that via paint. Not more Metadata there.

This is how the NSA recommended that sensitive documents should be redacted and sanitized prior to release to the public, actually.

 

[watchcollector1968]

Appreciate you posting this. As a new Android user I am discovering that lots of apps have access to information that they really have no business using.

 

[Zombie]

to me old news - I keep mine off for the most part maybe if I traveled somewhere or occasional picture when I first get the phone and don't know it is on

 

[Blue Baby]

Thanks for sharing

 

[KOPBET]

http://www.okshooters.com/forums/showthread.php?t=72345

But never hurts to add a reminder.