12/17/2015
WARNING! DANGER! CAUTION! AAAAH!!!
If a picture is worth 1000 words, what then is a digital photo worth? Read this or it just might turn out to be worth... YOUR LIFE! I'm going to explain how every single picture you've taken with a digital camera or mobile phone can be used to easily your sensitive personal data by anyone, regardless of their intelligence or skills with modern technology, how it can really screw up your day, or even result in death.
Digital photography has made it easier for us to document everything we could want and more. Literally EVERY... THING... Although you might find it somewhat annoying when your news feed seems like a river of pictures of peoples cats, meals, children, selfies, and club scenes that will never run dry, there is also something you should know about them that could prevent a disaster of indescribable horror and sorrow!
Seriously though, most people who casually use their computers would be shocked if they knew how easy it is to learn so much about a person from a picture downloaded from the Web. For the last 10 to 15 years, most digital cameras and phones have been given the ability of recording a wealth of information directly into the image. This has proven invaluable to photographers and other professions relying on digital imaging.
The Exchangeable Image File Format (EXIF) standard has been around since the turn of the century. The 2000's not the 1900's! When your phone or digital camera takes a picture it records and embeds things like the date and time the picture was taken, the camera settings such as ISO speed and focal length, shutter speed, flash, and red eye removal, photoshop filters, and in devices that are GPS enabled even your exact latitude and longitude!
Consider this scenario.
"It's Saturday night and you are out at the club dancing, having a few cocktails, flirting with strangers when a friend of yours takes a photo of you and your friends and uploads it to a popular social media site around 10pm. You're having a great time while another person is having a totally different night. For the past 6 months, a former coworker that got fired a while back has been sitting at home in a smelly little apartment, staring at the screen of his computer, going through your pictures and reading your posts like he does every night because he's been stalking you virtually. You two became friends online when you worked together, but you forgot about him when and you forgot about him a week after his departure from the company that employs you but he didn't forget about you. He sees a notification that you have been tagged in a photo and immediately downloads it, right clicks it, selects properties and then goes under the details tab and there it is! He has it! There in plain English is everything he needs. The information he now has tells him where you are, who you are with, and in the image he can see what you are wearing so it will be easy to spot you leaving the club. Now he just waits for you to walk to your car..."
Okay, that's even creeping me out and it's just a bit of fiction I quickly rattled out of my brain but is it that far fetched? Couldn't there be more sinister people willing to do a lot more? Imagine a divorced parent that sees pictures of their children online and now has a map to find them after the parent with custody had to skip town and start a new life somewhere out of fear and desperation. There are too many weirdos with too many delusional thought processes to imagine so I could go on and on. The fact is, if you don't take simple precautions before blasting your pics all over the place, you are offering your private info to anyone who wants to look for it.
If you tested this out on Facebook or Instagram you may have noticed that the pictures look pretty clean compared to the ones that you took from the directory on your computer where you store photos downloaded from your camera. That's because Facebook does indeed wipe the EXIF data from photos when they are uploaded from your computer, but there are still events that can happen, which include broken code, malicious employees, acts of cyber terrorism, and don't forget the NSA spying on everyone in America and likely the rest of the world. Plus Facebook itself is probably the one that would most likely use that data for some end or another, whether it be for advertising, or in cooperation with law enforcement, the government, or intergalactic aliens to round us all up for whatever reason they come up with!
There is an ending to this thread that doesn't involve you in a ditch or your house being robbed while you're at Burning Man rockin' out to some crunchy grooves. Available for free online are more than one program that can wipe all of this info out of your photos leaving a few minor technical details such as pixel size and a few other things that are of no use to even Dog the bounty hunter.
You may have already checked a picture or two of your own and noticed that in the same menu that you find all of this data there is an option at the bottom of the window that reads, "Remove Properties and Personal Information" and figured you could just click that and throw your cares away. Although Windows can delete EXIF data from photos, it is not 100% and likely will fail to remove some of the values that you would to wipe. Luckily for us, there are people out there that don't trust their lives with a bug riddled and clunky operating system such as Windows and have taken the time to figure out what Windows sucks at or doesn't do at all. Next they then create software that does the job correctly and securely. A little visit to your favorite search engine would be enough to get you the solution to your problems, but you are easily distracted and you may forget to do this after you spend 45 minutes looking up cat pictures and people hurting themselves. So I'm going to provide you with a few of the best examples to save me the guilt of knowing I could have saved you the pain of being murdered turned into a piece of a leather chair in some guys creepy apartment.
Hopefully this has been informative, entertaining, and frightening enough to get you to imagine yourself in horrible agony, begging for the release of death if only to stop the pain, so you stop being irresponsible with your privacy. It's one of the few freedoms left and in most cases it's already gone. Don't just give it away.
Here's a link to a Wiki that will provide you with a list of popular freeware and shareware (free and not free) EXIF editing and removing tools available online and direct links to them shouldn't do any harm to your computer the way a Google search likely could and would. Good luck out there!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchangeable_image_file_format
