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Does turning off geotagging really work?

DarkEnergy

It might sound like a stupid question but with today's technology and the nsa, is it still possible for someone to figure out where a picture was taken from?

 

An example would be what if there was a backdoor put in place so that normal software can't detect where the picture was taken from but special software can that you can't normally get.

 

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It might sound like a stupid question but with today's technology and the nsa, is it still possible for someone to figure out where a picture was taken from?

 

An example would be what if there was a backdoor put in place so that normal software can't detect where the picture was taken from but special software can that you can't normally get.

Of course it is, 

Normally with most smartphones, it uploads the location of where the picture was taken to your phone. 

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Of course it is, 

Normally with most smartphones, it uploads the location of where the picture was taken to your phone. 

Even if geotagging is off? If so, where in the phone is it uploaded?

 

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Even if geotagging is off? If so, where in the phone is it uploaded?

If you take off geotagging then there shouldn't be beyond physically matching the picture and location

 

im pretty sure location data is still stored in the images exif data

pretty sure geotagging is exif data.

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im pretty sure location data is still stored in the images exif data

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im pretty sure location data is still stored in the images exif data

Not sure, I used this: http://regex.info/exif.cgi and it didn't show the location.

 

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Well it will depend on your camera/phone. If they just follows the JPEG/Exif standards (which pretty much everyone does, except HTC with their new duo camera crap) then your location won't be embedded in the photo itself.

If there are closed source components relating to the camera then you can't really be sure that it doesn't save your location in some other location though. For example it might not embed your location in the JPEG file but it might save something like a text file containing "photo Park-Bench was taken at cord X.Y) somewhere on the phone, or uploading it to some server. In the case of Facebook, they might store where you were located when you uploaded the photo and in that way track where you were even if the photo itself doesn't contain any location data.

 

Anyway this is just theoretical stuff. We have no evidence that any of these things are being done. Even in those worst case scenarios you still don't need to worry about your location being embedded in the image itself.

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If you open the app and snap it fast enough you can probably beat GPS lock. :lol:

 

But in all seriousness, on a consumer store bought phone, I think if you turn GPS services off it can't do it, I'm not saying it couldn't be designed not to actually turn off, but somebody somewhere would have discovered it.

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You can go into the properties of the picture to clear personal information. Pictures uploaded online with geotagging...this is how pedis get them kids.

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