You're probably tired of stories about privacy, Facebook and social media. But in the midst of all that the past few months, I continue to see lots of my online friends taking quizzes, liking posts and especially uploading photos.
Oh, what's the harm in posting a photo?
Your camera or phone adds a lot of data to a photo file. Especially with your camera's phone (on Flickr and many photo sharing sites, the most popular "camera" is a phone) you are sharing your location, the date and time, the kind of device you used and its device ID and your mobile provider. It will also ping off any nearby Wi-Fi spots or cell towers, so your location is there even if you don't add that to the image post.
Add in facial recognition, which Facebook and Google use on your photos, and features will try to determine who is in that photo. If you tagged anyone or captioned the photo or added a new specific location, you are feeding the database. Thanks, users!
Think about how this data along with knowing who your friends are and their data and where you go with or without them and it builds a very robust picture of you and your world.
Can't this be controlled by us? To a degree, yes, but not totally. Your phone and some cameras will automatically record that data for every shot. You can turn off location services/geotagging in some instances, but I'm not even convinced that the data still isn't there anyway. And if you are automatically backing up your photos to iCloud or Google or somewhere in the cloud, I'm not positive that even your deleted photos are forever gone along with their metadata.
Am I overly paranoid? Can anyone be overly paranoid about privacy these days?
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