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Photos that Reveal Where You Live

By Alvin Soon - on 16 Aug 2010, 11:29am

Photos that Reveal Where You Live

If you care about your privacy enough to look through your Facebook or Twitter settings, there's one more thing you need to care about: your photographs.

Because of geo-tagging features available on many smartphone cameras, a photo can save the co-ordinates of where it was taken, which can be pinpointed on a map later. This helps when you're looking through your home albums to see where you did what, but it doesn't help when you upload it to certain sites which may reveal your location - such as where you live:

When Adam Savage, host of the popular science program “MythBusters,” posted a picture on Twitter of his automobile parked in front of his house, he let his fans know much more than that he drove a Toyota Land Cruiser.

Embedded in the image was a geotag, a bit of data providing the longitude and latitude of where the photo was taken. Hence, he revealed exactly where he lived. And since the accompanying text was “Now it’s off to work,” potential thieves knew he would not be at home.

Read the New York Times for the full story.

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