Geo Tagging Risk

What Is Geo Tagging?

Geo tagging is a process of adding geographical information like latitude and longitude co ordinates to a various media like photos, videos etc. This information becomes part of meta data. This features is very useful for providing location based services. Majority of smart phone and digital camera has this feature which is enabled by default. So whenever you take a photo using your smart phone, your location information gets embedded in the photo. This can be extracted from the image by your adversary.

Consider a situation where you took a photo of your sweet home and uploaded on the social media with description" Away from Sweet Home for a family vacation." Now your adversary can extract your home location and may plan a robbery. Adversary can search sites like Flickr® or Google™ maps by location to see who takes photos there and research the users who took the photos. Careful analysis of multiple photos from the same user or a collection of related users may lead to determine patterns of your activities.

What to do?

Be aware about what you are uploading. If this feature is not required, disable it. Mostly this can be disabled by going into the settings of your camera. look for GPS or location icon in settings and disable it.