“I Can Stalk U” – Raising Awareness About Inadvertent Information Sharing

As if PleaseRobMe.com wasn’t enough, icanstalku.com has also launched a website to take advantage of the geo location information that people inadvertently shares online, mainly focusing on Twitter tweets.

icanstalku.com presents a twitter feed on their front page with the title “What are people really saying in their tweets?” – instead of showing the actual tweets, they pull the geotagging information from uploaded pictures to services such as Twitpic and displays the address as the tweet.

Here’s an example:

CookieDoctor007: I am currently nearby Dellette, United States

The actual tweet reads:

Step 3 cookie making, pipe stiff royal icing border-doesn’t have to be super nice http://twitpic.com/271ulz

The picture linked to in that tweet was taken around Dellette, US. The GPS coordinates are inside the picture’s meta data, for the world to see.

Now, there’s two things to pay attention to when it comes to geotagging.

1) If the phone doesn’t have a GPS, GPS is turned off or the GPS failed to get a lock-on (like if you’re inside a building), the picture might be geotagged by triangulating cellphone towers and thus not give you an exact location (as is the case with the example above). This might not be a big problem since nobody will be able to tell exactly where you took the picture, but you might not want a stalker (if you have one) or a potential burglar to know that you’re now out of your house.

2) If the phone does have built-in GPS and it managed to get a proper lock-on, it will geotag the picture with your exact position, potentially down to only a few meters precision. This might be a bad idea if you publish a picture of your expensive home entertainment system or your fancy car, parked in your garage.

icanstalku.com is trying to raise awareness about inadvertent information sharing – such as uploading geotagged pictures.

If you want, you can go to your cellphone camera settings and disable geotagging completely, but you won’t be able to view the pictures later on in a GPS-enabled application. I’m so into geotagging that I manually do it to some of my pictures that I shoot with my Nikon D5000, just so that I can look them up on a map to see what pictures I took where – and so that I can remember in 20 years where I shot this and that picture. Luckily, my pocket camera, Sony HX5V, has a built-in GPS, so it takes care of everything all by itself – pretty much like mobile phone cameras does.

It’s also possible that whatever application you’re using to share your mobile pictures, will have a setting that removes geotagging information before uploading. Check it out and adjust the settings according to your needs.

Any questions, concerns or opinions? Feel free to leave a comment below. Don’t worry, your comments are not geotagged

Tagged as: Geotagging, GPS, Nikon D5000, Photography, Sony HX5V, Twitpic, Twitter

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