How Your Photos Expose Location
I’m a new dad, naturally I’ve been taking tons of photos of my son. They’ve been edited, texted, filtered, and uploaded for the world to see.
But I had a shocking realization this morning: My photos are seriously compromising my family’s privacy.
But How?
95% of the photos I take are from my phone. And I think you’re probably in the same boat. Guess what? Your phone is probably tagging your exact GPS location on every photo you are taking.
Check out this photo from our Bali Honeymoon:
At a glimpse, nothing really revealing. But there is a crazy amount of potentially invasive data in ‘Exif’, the Metadata of the photo.
Since I took this photo on my phone, my exact location is stored in the Exif. There are tons of Exif viewer websites, applications out there that can load your photo, read the Metadata, and display it.
Click here to see all the Exif data for my scooter photo.
What was Revealed?
Here’s the creepiest stuff:
- My Latitude/Longitude
- Timestamp
- My exact phone model
Other weird stuff:
- The direction I’m facing
- Whether or not I used a flash
What does this mean?
It means that anytime I’ve texted, emailed, or posted a photo, there is (potentially) some privacy killing information out in the wild. If I upload a photo of my son to my website, his location is public knowledge. If I post a picture of my favorite secret surf spot to Facebook, Zuckerberg might show up the next day with his entourage. If you text a fling a selfie from your couch, they can figure out your address.
If this stuff doesn’t concern you, good for you. Otherwise, keep reading if you want to know the strategies I’m using.
Remove Exif Metadata from Photos
I’m using an OSX tool called ImageOptim to strip all Exif data from my site photos.
There are tons of tools, websites, apps that do this for you, but I liked ImageOptim for a couple reasons:
- I didn’t have to upload my photos to some random website
- It can do entire directories at a time.
- Added Bonus: Reduces image file size
Any image you’ll find posted at this site (besides the scooter above) will have no compromising Exif metadata.
Turn Off Photo Location Tagging
iOS offers a quick easy way to prevent my location from being tagged on each photo. Go to Settings -> Privacy -> Location Services -> Camera then select ‘Never’.
Going forward, photos I take with my phone will not have GPS metadata. I wish I could strip out all the other Exif data by default (like timestamp, phone model, etc), but GPS is obviously the most important thing. And with Location Services off, I’ll probably save some battery life.
Click here to my scooter photo, stripped of all the Exif data.
Thanks for reading!