How can you find out where a picture was taking by looking at the coding in the file?
I read a story about some Burger King employees who screwed around with customers by stomping on some salad without them knowing. One of the employees took a picture of it on their phone and posted it on the Internet. Some hackers (not really, but for lack of better term, just people who knew what they could do) apparently were able to find the Burger King that this was done by downloading the picture and somehow, within the code, finding out where it was taken.
I wonder how that’s possible. Like can anyone really check up on that without necessarily taking a lot of computer courses or is it much harder to do? And does this mean that ANY picture you get online you can figure out where it was taken, or would this only work for cellphone pictures?
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It is called EXIF data.
Here is a tool that will show you the info.
http://regex.info/exif.cgi
Here is a URL of a picture I took today while walking the the laundromat.
http://stfudamnit.com/ryan/IMG_0018.JPG
Plug it in and you will see tons of data about the camera. It will even show you where I took the picture at on a map.
As you can see a lot of metadata is recorded when you take a picture. There are tools to strip the EXIF data if you are concerned about it. That nailed my location within a meter.
Oh, for the sake of curiosity I cropped the image and made it grayscale. The EXIF data is still intact. And as a added bonus it shows the software I used to edit the file.
http://stfudamnit.com/ryan/IMG_0018b.jpg
But in photoshop if I select “Save for Web” the EXIF metadata is indeed stripped.
@johnpowell, you used your cellphone, though, right? I assume this wouldn’t work with a digital camera (camera only) without the GPS feature active.
Location wouldn’t work with a point and shoot unless it has GPS and some do now. And yes, I used a iPhone for that pic.
But most pictures and videos are done with phones now since the best camera is the one you have with you.
But my Canon A2200 doesn’t record location data. Here is what it does gather.
I have a point and shoot with GPS, and the first thing I did was turn it off. Not only to protect my privacy, but to prolong battery life as well.
On my mobile devices, I turn off location tracking for all but the maps/navigation apps. I sometimes turn them on when we go out and about, but they are almost always off. However, sometimes the little icon pops up when I’m on Google Chrome and I do not have location enabled for this app… that really bugs me.
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