The Filutowski Law Firm, PLLC

Photos taken with your digital camera or smartphone that have GPS capability, tag the geographic location of where the photo was taken.  It records the longitude and latitude of your location and makes it publicly available on the Internet to those savvy enough to access it.   This sneaky ability is called ‘geotagging’ and occurs unknowingly to millions of the photo-snapping public.

One’s location is readily revealed while using Foursquare and Gowalla as well as when posting to Twitter from a GPS-enabled mobile device, but the geographical data is not hidden as it is when posting photos.

Many users of online social media proudly post photos of their friends, children, home, new car purchase, new plasma screen TV, etc. – openly, and unknowingly advertising to the wide world of hackers and potential criminals where they can potentially obtain their next loot.

The New York Times reports that someone with little knowledge about writing computer code can create a program to search for geotagged photos in a systematic way on Twitter, Craigslist, YouTube and other popular websites.  The hacker can search for photos with the phrase “on vacation” or those taken in a specified neighborhood.

“Any 16 year-old with basic programming skills can do this,” said Gerald Friedland, a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. He and a colleague, Robin Sommer, wrote a paper, “Cybercasing the Joint: On the Privacy Implications of Geotagging,” which they presented on Tuesday at a workshop in Washington during the Advanced Computing Systems Association’s annual conference on security.

Peter Eckersley, staff technologist with the San Francicso-based Electronic Frontier Foundation statedthat “consent is sort of a slippery slope when the only way you can turn off the function on your smartphone is through an invisible menu that no one really knows about.”   to adequately warn consumers of their invasion of privacy creates a legal basis for alleging invasion of privacy and other possible torts.  A spur of lawsuits may come underway in the form of a class action of consumers and individual civil suits arising out of a personal hacking incidents.

 Disabling the geotagging features on smartphones is buried under a number of submenus making it near impossible for the unsuspecting consumer to disable the feature.  ICanStalkU.com provides step-by-step instructions for disabling the photo geotagging function on iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and Palm devices.

Academic researchers and independent Web security analysts, “white hat hackers,” are trying to raise awareness about geotags by releasing studies and giving presentationsat technology get-togethers like the Hackers On Planet Earth, or Next HOPE, conference held last month in New York.

Some sites do not enable geotagging, or are in the process of limiting geotag capability.  Facebook and Match.com do not retain gotag information in the way images are retained and uploaded to their sites.  Flickr has recently taken stepsto block access to geotag data on images taken with smartphones unless a user explicitly allows it.

Be careful when uploading photos to the Internet.  Disable your GPS locator on your smartphone and use online photo albums that disable geotagging. 

If you are interested in pursuing a legal action regarding your invasion of privacy in relation to any service that enables geotagging, please contact Alexandra Filutowski for a consultation. 

Copyright © 2010 The Filutowski Law Firm, PLLC. This post is intended for general information purposes only and should not be construed as legal advice or legal opinions on any specific facts or circumstances. An attorney-client relationship is not created or continued by reading this post. If you would like further information regarding the matters discussed herein, you may post a comment. If you need a consultation on a legal matter, contact Alexandra Filutowski.