Cellphone Pictures Represent a Positional Security Risk by Virtue of Included GPS Data
Sunday, 18 March 2012 – One small fact that most of us fail to realize is that every time we take a picture with our cell phone, the GPS coordinate is nested within the data.
For military this represents a definite security threat, as the following article attests. But for the average person, it also means that the location where you take your cell phone pictures may also include your location. So the next time you’re thinking about taking a picture of the kids in the swimming pool in the back yard, just consider the possibility that some nut case out there may know how to glean the GPS data from those images you post to your Facebook account.
Now, that’s a sobering thought for any caring parent….
When you take a photo with your cellphone, the gps coordinates of the location you took the picture is embedded into the image. When you upload said photo onto the internet for all to see, people can pull the location data from that picture. If you think this is just people being paranoid and that the Taliban would never do this in Afghanistan, think again. Insurgents figured out how to use this to their advantage in Iraq years ago. In 2007, a group of Iraqi insurgents used geotags to destroy several American AH-64 Apache choppers sitting on a flightline in Iraq.
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