![]() ![]() Many smartphones and digital cameras come with built-in GPS with a geotagging feature that embeds at least the latitude and longitude coordinates of your location. Would you like to tag a safety threat to your photo? Canon’s PowerShot SX280 HS is one such digital camera with built-in GPS you can use to geotag your photos. Before you succumb to fear and turn off the geotagging feature on your devices and apps, however, let’s look at how the process works, the security issues involved, and how you can easily keep yourself from harm. While seemingly harmless, with every photo they post, there are possible dangers that users may not be aware of when they expose themselves, friends, and family members to. Today, everyone who uses social media like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram is most likely utilizing this technology in some form – whether they realize it or not. Photographers can benefit from photos encoded with GPS data: Using the data, photos can be easily cataloged, organized, and classified, especially into areas of special interest. Geo-coordinates are often also reported to apps running on a cell phone, such as Angry Birds.”īesides location, that metadata (found in a file’s EXIF data) might also include elevation, bearing, distance, and even the name of a place like restaurants and shops. “In other words, earth coordinates (often accurate to +/-1m) as reported by GPS modules built into cell phones and cameras (or guessed using Wi-Fi and cell-tower triangulation) are embedded in machine-readable format (i.e., not necessarily obvious to humans) as part of a JPEG file, a Twitter post, or Facebook Places. “Geotagging is adding geo-location metadata to an image or social media post,” says Gerald Friedland, director of Audio and Multimedia Research at the International Computer Science Institute, a private, non-profit research laboratory affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley. It’s one of the components that make our photos more “social.” One use of GPS is geotagging, which is the process of attaching location information to content such as a photograph or video (when you shoot and upload a photo to Facebook with the location of your whereabouts, for example, that’s geotagging). From using it to find our way home when we are lost to getting directions to that new trendy restaurant, we don’t even give it a second thought anymore, yet, it’s a valuable tool in our daily routine. Global Positioning System satellite technology (better known as GPS) is embedded into so many of the devices we use today for location purposes, that we sometimes take it for granted.
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