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Geo-tagging photos can lead to cyberstalkers finding you

A new threat could be giving up your location when you post a picture from inside your house. A team of scientists dicovered that with some smartphones, a user’s latitude and longitude can be attached tothe picture you post in the metadata.

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When you take a photo of yourself in your house and then post it via Facebook or twitpic, you assume that no one will really know where you are taking that picture. Well, you may be wrong. Social media security is in a very nascent development stage. There are a number of theats already to social media such as malicious applications in Facebook or trojans in shortened URLs that the average user does not know about or where to turn to for advice.

A new threat could be giving up your location when you post a picture from inside your house. A team of scientists dicovered that with some smartphones, a user’s latitude and longitude can be attached tothe picture you post in the metadata. That’s pretty scary. See the news story ” Tips to Turn Off Geo-Tagging on Your Cell Phone”  (http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/celebrity-stalking-online-photos-videos-give-location/story?id=11443038) “Many people are not aware of the fact that there are geotags in photos and videos,” said Gerald Friedland, one of the scientists.

A website that has been setup to show the dangers of this capability is www.icanstalku.com. So what can you do about this? Do you want to be stalked?  ON the IPhone, go to Settings, General, then Location Services and disable the applications you do not want to use Geo-tagging, such as Camera.

Regards

Gary Bahadur

www.zcurity.com

blog.zcurity.com

888-572-2911

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