Photos from Twitter "talked" in the hands of hackers

And not always that the photo can “say” will be pleasant to its owner. In general, it will be a long-sore problem - the negligence of Internet users and the leakage of personal information. The fact is that a large number of new cellular models are equipped with a geotagging function, and somehow very few people understand the potential danger of this function. At yesterday’s hacker conference Next HOPE, one of the participants said that he had analyzed more than 2.5 million photos posted by users of the Twitter service, and more than 65,000 of them were marked with coordinates.

It seems that a person who buys a modern cell phone should understand that the geo-tagging function is designed to show our current location. As it turned out, most owners of mobile devices with this feature do not even think about the potential danger of leakage of personal information.
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How it works? Yes, quite simply, when receiving a snapshot, the cell receives the coordinates of the current location of the user and adds this data to the EXIF ​​metadata of the snapshot. In this case, we all know what kind of pictures are posted by Twitter users. Some post very personal photos, wanting to remain anonymous.

It sounds ridiculous, but the hacker from the conference showed a snapshot of a man who is an anonymous Twitter user. The picture can not be called "family" or "respectable." In this case, the hacker was able to determine the address, telephone number and name of the man according to the snapshot. As it turned out, he even has a wife who is unlikely to be pleased with such “creativity”.

In general, negligence and stupidity can be talked about forever, and the hacker did not dwell on this topic for a long time. Instead, he presented his created resource ICanStalkU.com , where he analyzed images from the main page of the twitpic.com resource. Next to the thumbnail image is shown the nickname of the user, plus information about the current location of this user. It shows in such a simple way how many careless people who do not even suspect that their photos just shout “I am in such and such a place”.

The service even converts coordinates into addresses, street and city names (if possible, of course). The basis of the service is a tricky Perl script.

The goal of the site, according to its creator, is to “scare users”, to make them think and decide whether it is necessary that anyone could know where you are at the moment. After all, it is so easy to turn off the geotagging function, but few people do it, even if they fear leaks of such information.

It is clear that the method of determining coordinates using image metadata has long been no news for most members of the habrasoobshchestva (if this was ever news at all). I just wanted to demonstrate an interesting service and once again warn you - be harmful to smoking, be careful!

Here is the source .