Should parents be worried by reports about location data contained in photographs posted on social networks?
IT STARTED WITH an e-mail message from a concerned Facebook friend: “Please no longer use smartphones to e-mail pics of our boys and tell your friends who have kids.”
The e-mail had an attached link, to a US NBC Action Newsreport, describing how easy it is for predators to track down the location of children from data information available from photographs posted online or even shared via e-mail. Taking photographs with your phone and uploading them on to social networking sites is something many parents do without a second thought, myself included.
Last week I uploaded this picture of my four-year-old daughter Sarah having lunch at a local cafe. My Facebook friends left comments and several “liked” it. It never occurred to me that it could be accessed by someone not on my approved list of friends and that our location could be identified. The news report suggested that criminals could steal children to order or, as the newscast put it “cherry pick” using a database of photographs provided by their unwitting parents. It smacked of scaremongering, a story generated to play on every parents’ worst fears.
It is generally accepted that tracking is a normal part of owning a mobile phone. Many people “check in” via their Facebook accounts, effectively announcing to their friends their location. But with smartphones and some Android phones, the issue lies in how the data is used and who might gain access to it. The risk lies in the transfer of the data to a PC or Mac, where the data can be potentially accessed by a hacker.
When you post photographs on Facebook, Picassa and other social media networks and “share” them via your smartphone, there is hidden data attached to each photo. This can include information about where the photo was taken. It is possible for anyone who wishes to download these shared photos to pinpoint the location, sometimes to within 15 feet.
The story originally broke following a study written by researchers Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden, which was presented at the Where 2.0 conference in California last week. They reported that the tracking feature, which is included in Apple’s 3G-enabled devices running the fourth generation of its iPhone operating system (iOS4), keeps a record of the phone’s latitude and longitude, along with the time of the visit. This data is stored in the handset and is then transferred to a user’s PC or Mac when the device is connected and synched through Apple’s iTunes software.
“There’s no immediate harm that would seem to come from the availability of this data. Nor is there evidence to suggest this data is leaving your custody. But why this data is stored and how Apple intends to use it – or not – are important questions that need to be explored,” according to Allan and Warden.
Martin Bradley, a software engineer and father of seven-month-old Aoibh, from Draperstown, Co Derry, says, “The issue as I see it is that your location can be identified from photos without your knowledge and when you put them in the public domain you don’t know who will end up seeing them.
“I will still use my phone to take pictures of Aoibh. A hacker can access a lot of information from your computer anyway, regardless of whether or not the information is encrypted in a photograph. Most of the time we are tagging our own photographs but we shouldn’t be put at risk by smartphones without our knowing or being able to disable the device easily,” he adds.
Posting a photograph of your child could create a risk, but really the likelihood of someone tracking your child via the embedded information is small.
What can you do to protect your photographs? The tracking information appears to come from mobile phone masts rather than the phone’s GPS system, meaning that it cannot be disabled as long as the phone is receiving a network signal. Disabling your phone’s tracking devices will not necessarily prevent a hacker from accessing information but it does provide some safety.
You can change your social-networking settings to “private” so only people you invite into your network can see your photos. It can take a bit of time and patience to check your privacy settings, but it does give you peace of mind if you know who is accessing your photographs and other information.
You can turn off the tracking through the settings menus. Unfortunately, doing so disables many applications that make smartphones “smart” in the first place, such as maps. .
Turning off tracking means that certain applications such as Facebook checking in, maps and Foursquare social media won’t have access to your GPS locations either.
