My friend just bought a new phone, and despite all the recommendations a few of us have given him, he went and bought an iPhone :facepalm: As well as it being a total waste of perfectly good money, the iPhone has a feature enabled which also broadcasts your location to everybody in the whole world who has an internet connection.
Geo-tagging. Why anyone would want to have this turned on is completely beyond my belief, but the scary thing is - it's enabled by default. Worried yet? Well, if you're an iPhone owner then you probably should be, especially if you share your photos on the internet via social networking sites, or even upload them to Photobucket or Imageshack.
Geo-tagging allows your iPhone to access it's GPS system, pinpoint your location at the time you took your photograph, and write that information to the EXIF data stored in the image. If you don't know what
EXIF data is, then I suggest clicking that link and reading the Wikipedia page on it. The information is stored inside the image, and if you don't remove it before uploading it to the internet... Well, that's how people are able to see exactly where you are and where you've been.
So, if you own an iPhone and are conscious about your privacy then you should seriously consider disabling this terrible feature!
Comments
You can already do that by LOOKING AT THE FUCKING PICTURES! It's not a privacy invasion if I take a picture of Big Ben and my camera knows it's in London.
Also, the iPhone is a damn good phone, what's your beef?
In most cases no, it's not easy and straightforward to identify someone's location based on a picture alone. Sure, if you're standing in front of the Eiffel Tower or similar landmark, then obviously it's not going to be a secret, but the vast majority of pictures are taken without unique background scenery. Personally, I go out of my way to ensure that none of the 5000+ pictures in my Photobucket albums could potentially give away my location to any observers. Geo-tagging would only serve to nullify this effort and hand my identity directly to law enforcement, or anyone else who happened to want it.
Also, the iPhone is an overpriced piece of junk which is easily surpassed by several of its less expensive competitors.
Sorry. Retarded self answered question.
I've had a look through the ROM we're using, and there's a setting regarding location somewhere... I can't remember exactly where it is, but it exists. I think it's default turned off, but I could be wrong. There's no location data in the EXIF for images though, so we're safe there.
A couple nights later, I had an interview with the Police which is when I handed over the picture and his details, and they went and arrested him. He managed to fucking break my PS3 though :mad: Thankfully, I got some compensation on it.
Anyway, I was genuinely worried at the power of this Geo-tagging feature and it actually turned me off of getting an iPhone. If I was to ever do something stupid with pictures and forget to remove EXIF data, I'd be a gonner.
Ive actually used the feature to streamline some business processes that need to be audited as part of my job, when a field audit is conducted they take photos with their phone and send it to my email - it has the created time, geotag and i know that cant be edited using the iphones we give them.
That sounds good, I'm going to download it and give it a shot. Hopefully it's easier than having to manually remove all the info whenever I upload my pictures to the computer.
All these apps that have to have GPS enabled and know your location are bullshit.