Geotagging Your Pictures May Put Your Children At Risk.

Keep Children Safe When Taking Their Pictures

The internet is a wonderful way to share family experiences as we are doing in this blog.  When we take pictures with our digital camera we take great care to ensure that we keep our location very general while still putting our experiences within an accurate geographical context.  

James at Wonderland aged 6.

With the onset of Blackberries, iPhones, Smart phones and tablets on those occasions that we have forgotten to take our camera we just snap away with either of these alternative devises. 

Now what would you say if in doing this we may have provided a stalker with our exact location?  

I learned about "Hidden Dangers of Cell Phone Pictures"  by Fox23.com on Facebook when my cousin Harriett posted a link to the video.  In the video you watch a Fox23 news crew hack into a child’s picture ( I believe the child to be that of one of their staff) and through the pictures that the mother posted on the web pinpoint the family home, school the child attended, and the area of the park in which the child played. 

WOW this was disturbing.  The video ended by showing us how to turn off the CPS tracking option on cell phones and tablets when taking pictures – in essence closing this very dangerous hidden back door into our lives.  We knew right then and there that we would blog about this.  

Now we do not believe everything we read on the internet so we waited a few days to see if anything more came of this.  Today is the day to create this post so we went back to the Facebook posting to get the video link – it is gone?  Next we went to the Fox23.com webpage for this article and yes the video is currently unavailable and the printed material is still on line.  We do not know what this means so we are posting this blog with full disclosure of this information and letting you decide. 

The article “Hidden Dangers of Cell Phone Pictures” was first aired by Fox23 on 4/01/2011 so the article is already over two years old.  Nothing is more important to us than the safety of our children, grandchild and we are paying more attention to our own security so we have turned off the CPS tracking on our devises.

Here is what you do if you to want to turn the Geotagging off on your pictures.  The articles sends you to http://icanstalku.com/how.php and once at this site you click on the type of phone you have and follow the instructions.  iPhone - go to settings → general → then Location Services and turn camera from on to off.  BlackBerry (which I use) select options → advanced options → GPS → press menu key → select disable GPS and select yes to confirm and this also disables all GOS capabilities on the phone.  Or go to picture taking and press on the camera pull down from the top and you will setting click this and ensure that Geotagging is off.

Icanstalku goes into more detail and I would encourage you to go to the website and read what they have to say. 

Are we paranoid?

I don’t know and I feel better knowing how to turn the Geotagging function off and on.  It is a great tool when we want to use it and has no business attaching itself to the pictures we take.

Our children are too precious to take risks with!

Note: when words are underlined and in blue this is a link and will take you to site being described.

Grandma Snyder