Sharing your location in real time via GPS-based devices on social networking sites can leave you vulnerable to cyber stalking.
Ashwathi, a student from Bangalore, admits to spending a chunk of her time on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Last month, while she waited for her friend in a neighbourhood shopping mall, she updated her location via a GPS-based mobile device.
“An unknown person approached me and introduced himself. I had received a friend request from the same person on Facebook, which I had politely declined. But when he saw my location update in Facebook, he was able to locate me.”
Close to 60 per cent of mobile users in India today visit sites like Facebook, Orkut and Twitter through their mobile phones, reports Informate Mobile research. And, there is an increasing number of people who watch you in the virtual world and can potentially misuse the personal information you share with them. Explosion of mobile phones, tablet PCs and netbooks with GPS, means your device can pinpoint your exact whereabouts on a map when you recommend a local restaurant or a pizza parlour on a social networking site.
Recently, Facebook, which has more than 15 million users in India, has launched a new application called Places where a user can share his/her location with friends in real-time.
Vinoo Thomas, technical product manager of McAfee says: “More internet users are adding global positioning system (GPS) information to their social media updates so their friends and colleagues can see where they are. Add to it, location-based services like Foursquare and Facebook Places, it becomes even more easy to search and track whereabouts of friends and strangers.”
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Simply put, geotagging is where geographical information such as your GPS coordinates are added and embedded to different types of media (pictures, videos, status updates on social media sites or even blogs). Invisible to the naked eye, geotags become part of the meta-data, or underlying data about the data, that accompanies each file.
That’s exactly what Sriram Venkat, an undergraduate student in University of Pennsylvania, found out when he visited his hometown in Chennai in December last year. “I uploaded some photos and videos of my parents, who live alone in Chennai, taken on my smartphone to several different social media sites.”
Little did Venkat know that posting the photos and videos could give the exact coordinates of his parents’ location. When his friend pointed the security hazards of geotagging, Venkat manually deleted all geotags on his photos and videos. “There were pictures of objects inside my house like appliances, etc and since my parents lived alone, it was safer to delete the location-tags.”
Another potentially harmful thing, warn cyber security experts, is to “check in” on location-based social networking applications. This is where an application allows you to “check in” at various businesses and locations, allowing friends and followers to chart where you are throughout the day.
This could potentially be dangerous because it establishes patterns and could identify where someone lives or works, Carl Leonard, security research manager of Websense warns. “Social networking applications can allow strangers to track your movements every day. If you watch someone long enough, they will know exactly when and where to find that person on any given day.”
| NOT SO PICTURE PERFECT |
| Did you know that when you share photos online, you put your privacy at stake — more than you imagine? |
| How it happens? When you take a picture with smartphones or cameras, it’s more then just an image. Most modern smartphones and some cameras can add geotags — information about the exact location where the picture has been taken. And anyone seeing it can get this information. With geotags, one can easily track down locations, and if there is a pattern, identify travelling habits or get a clear idea of your current location; leaving your home or other properties vulnerable to theft or damage. |
| How to disable automatic geotagging? To disable geotagging on your iPhone, go to Settings tab, then click on General and then Location Services. Here you can set applications that can access your GPS coordinates, or disable the feature entirely (which could cause you problems using maps and restaurant finders). To disable geotagging for photos on your BlackBerry, go to image capture, press the Menu button and choose Options. Set the “Geotagging” setting to Disable and save the updated settings. Consider installing a plug-in on your browser to reveal location data — like Exif Viewer for Firefox or Opanda IExif for Internet Explorer, so you can see geotagged data for yourself. Manually check settings to turn off geotagging features on Facebook and Twitter. Facebook Places, by default, is turned on for users unless you disable it under account settings. |
But the idea of geotagging on Facebook, however, has caused a stir among parenting and privacy bloggers because Facebook “friends” share so much information about family members and household activity that geotags could ultimately put a combination of dangerous information in the wrong person’s hands.
“Our young generation wants to stay connected with each other and they share all the information in public domain like internet that can be accessed from any part of the world. It is highly important that proper awareness about the usage of these public platforms and the need for privacy should be taught to the young generation,” opines Shantanu Ghosh, vice-president, India Product Operations, Symantec.
— With inputs from Priyanka Joshi