It's fun to see what's in the thumbnails, when they expose more than intended. But if you are posting photos from your phone, turn geotagging OFF, because it can reveal far more than many people realize.
I've attached a real-life example, from a post on a forum (not this one). The woman's boyfriend posted the photos of her from his iPhone. He had GPS and geotagging enabled, so the location where the pictures were taken were stored in the EXIF block embedded in the photo. Even without GPS on, your approximate location can be stored. In this case, GPS was on and it was accurate even inside the house.
I decided to see just how far a lat/long coordinate and the picture could take me. It took me right to his driveway, looking at his garage door in Google Maps street view, which matches the photo of the garage door taken from the inside, behind his girlfriend. As well as property records, his phone number, his Facebook account, both of their full names, relatives, and so on. It is freaky how much info is out there and how little it takes to find it.
So consider this a scare tactic...do turn off geotagging, or whatever it is called on your own phone, if you're going to post cell phone pictures, unless you actually
want to (potentially) expose your identity along with the picture. Once that picture is out there, there is no getting it back!
The same goes for Facebook pictures when you don't change the picture's Facebook filename. Facebook, with all their concern about privacy, puts the ID of the user's account right in the picture's filename. So if you take photos from someone's Facebook account and post them without renaming the files, you are basically posting a link back to their Facebook account. Facebook picture filenames are not anonymous at all, they point right back to the Facebook account you got them from.
End of PSA
