Thursday, September 16, 2010

ID and Home Theft Made Easy

Leaving the house this weekend? Telling all your Facebook buds about it? You might want to reconsider that. Police in Nashua, New Hampshire broke up a robbery ring this week that was using Facebook to plan their heists. The gang was monitoring Facebook pages to determine when a target would be out of their home and then robbed it. (more)

The moment is special: Your kid just learned how to ride a bike without training wheels. So you fire up your iPhone's camera, snap a photograph, upload the image to TwitPic, and share the evidence of your child's triumph via Twitter. When you post the picture, a subset of the 75 million Twitter users will know the exact location of you and your child. Digital photos automatically store a wealth of information--known as EXIF data--produced by the camera. Most of the data is harmless... 
Cat burglar is also an identity thief.
however... 
Ben Jackson detailed how he found personal details about a man in a photo. Using accompanying geotagging data, Jackson located the man's house on Google Earth. Then he found a name associated with the house where the photo was taken, leading him to a Facebook account that yielded a birth date, marriage status, and friends. A second username listed on the Facebook page led to a second Twitter account, and so forth. The point here is that once you start pulling on the thread of information contained in a geotagged image, a single photo can reveal a whole trove of personal data--far more than you might think. (more)