Uploading personal photos online is a very common activity we all do at some point of time.
Well, while uploading or sharing your photos on a platform where anyone can have a look at your photos, have you ever thought that unknowingly you are doing much more than just a simple photo sharing, you are actually also disclosing personal information via these photos?
There is something known as Exchangeable image file format (Exif) data, which is a set of information stored with in the image files of your photos. There are several set of information in EXIF data.
Basically, many digital camera and smartphones, automatically geotag the photos shot by them by embedding the longitude and latitude of the location where the photo was shot. This embedding of the location information in the Exif data makes your information available to anyone who has the photo.
Extracting the Exif data from a photo is no big deal, if you search, you can esily find several free programs to extract the Exif data of any image in a flash, and for example, EXIF Reader is an awesome way to extract Exif data from any photo.
This fact was recently discovered, and the Researchers Gerald Friedland and Robin Sommer told that they were able to obtain the address as well as phone number of the people who posted photos in ads on Craigslist.
So next time, when you are about to upload the photos online, try to remove or edit the Exif data first, in order to play safe.
