Online Privacy Add-on

Just a few weeks ago I posted about the idea of online privacy and how it is for the most part not existent.  Yesterday while I was catching up on the latest news on computer security giant, McAfee Inc‘s founder John McAfee, I noted one of the subjects I touched on was part of his down fall, metadata in digital photos!

In his case, while on the run from the authorities to evade questioning in the murder of his neighbor, he was giving interviews to media outlets and posting online.  One of these interviewers took a photo with his iPhone 4S of Mr. McAfee and because the “Location” service was turned on, the device embedded the exact GPS coordinates and date/time stamp of the photo in the photo’s metadata.  In this case it was  “Latitude/longitude: 15° 39’ 29.4 North, 88° 59’ 31.8 West, at 12:26 p.m. Monday”.  That is a pretty specific location for someone hiding.

This just goes to prove the idea that online privacy is hard to find!

Read more about John McAfee and his trouble with the law and metadata in this great writeup from the Washington Post.

Tags: iPhone, mcafee, metadata, photos, privacy