It’s important to understand what geotagging is, and potentially how dangerous it could be in regards to privacy for all. Whilst in a lot of instances it may not be too much of a concern, I believe it’s important to make everyone at least aware.
What is geotagging? Well it’s the adding of geographical identification metadata to many types of media, in this case I am talking photos. The type of geotag data is normally in the form of latitude, longitude co-ordinates and even altitude.
On one hand this is awesome data to have and I’ll give a a couple of good examples. If you have a smartphone capable of geotagging (and most are these days), and you have taken some great photos but cant remember where they were taken, look at the geotagging data to get an exact location.
I often like taking photos of specific locations, and then returning months or even years later to take a photo from the same location. Geotagging helps me greatly in doing this so I take the photo from the exact location.
Geotagging would be good for business also. One example off the top of my head is real estate agents and all the photos they take. What is the cliche here? Location, location, location ……. 🙂
Unfortunately there is a sinister side of Geotagging. Criminals and stalkers could (relatively) easily identify where someone is located by looking at photos posted online, and even if they are not home (work out the rest yourself) based on the photo and geotagging information.
It also is an issue for celebrities, of which a good example here is Adam Savage from the TV show Mythbusters. He posted a photo on Twitter of his car parked outside his house. Not only did he reveal where he lived, he also posted with the photo the text “Now it’s off to work,” – potential thieves knew he would not be at home.
How do I see the data? If you were to right click on a photo and select properties, and then the details tab, you should see something like below.
Thankfully getting rid of the data is quite easy. There are plenty of programs that are out the on the internet. I found a one call batchpurifierLITE. It allows me to batch remove geotagging and other exif data from multiple photos at once. There’s not much else to the program. It just works.
Also, if you uploading photos from smartphones you can switch off ‘location services’ (or similarly named) which will not geotag the pictures. However you may find that it coud affect the operation of some apps which require this to be turned on.
What you may find is that some programs will automatically remove geotagging information when you edit or resize photos also.
In conclusion, there are some great advantages to geotagging of photos, but just be aware of privacy issues being one of the dangers of geotagging your photos which could be revealed by this data. If if it is a concern, download a program like the one above and remove such data before posting online.