Blog Post: Mitigating Photo GeoTagging Safety Concerns with Windows Phone 7 Privacy Settings & Pro Photo Tools

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Photo GeoTagging seems to be making headlines this week and bring to our attention the potential dangers of Photo GeoTagging.

• http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/video?id=7621105&syndicate=syndicate&section
• http://www.myfoxtwincities.com/dpp/news/scitech/smart-phone-‘geo-tagging’-tracks-location-feb-22-2011

There is also popular web site ICanStalkU.com which also brings out the security and privacy issues implicated by this technology as well which states that they are raising awareness and noting that:

"After analyzing your photos, someone could find out: 

• Where you live
• Who else lives there
• Your commuting patterns
• Where you go for lunch each day
• Who you go to lunch with
• Why you...like to visit a certain nice restaurant on a regular basis

I think that most people if they realized they were posting exactly where they were each time they clicked "send" on their phone to post a photo to Twitter they would stop doing it at all!”

How can you protect yourself and others from potential privacy threats when using Windows Phone 7 privacy settings or Microsoft tools.

If you've allowed Camera to access your location, when you capture a photo with WP7, your location will be stored as metadata of the captured photo.  For photos, your location information is stored in the Exchangeable Image File Format (EXIF) tag.

There are a couple of options within WP7 to disable GeoTagging altogether or just when uploading to Facebook or Skydrive.

1. To disable Camera's ability to tag photos and videos you've captured with your phone's location
   • Go to Settings >Applications >Pictures + camera
   • Toggle the Include location (GPS) info in pictures you take
   • Switch to Off
2. If you would like to have location information removed from the metadata of photos you upload from your phone to Facebook or SkyDrive
   • Go to Settings >Applications >Pictures + camera
   • Toggle the Keep location info on uploaded pictures
   • Switch to Off.

Additional details on picture privacy settings can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsphone/en-us/privacy.aspx

To clean up existing GeoTags in photos already captured or posted, you can manually edit the GeoTag metadata out of photos using a free downloadable tool from Microsoft Pro Photo Tools v2.

The Pro Photo Tools allow you to add, change, and delete common metadata properties for digital photographs. You can place photos on the Live Earth map and then drag them to the right location. The GPS information will be stored back into the photos. If you have a GPS device, you can load track route files from the most popular formats (NMEA, GPX, and KML) and see them on the map. Then you can place your photos on the track route. Again, the GPS info will be stored into your file. When you have the right GPS location for your photos, you can automatically generate location info like country, state, city and even street names. Or if you know the location where a picture was taken, you can type it in and get the GPS location information automatically.

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