Carol Forsloff - Now here's one of those major news you can use. Is it safe to post videos and images online on places like Craigslist and Twitter? Possibly no in some cases, because it can lead people vulnerable to attacks in the real world.
It turns out with a certain form of technology people can "cybercase," which is using geo-tagged information available online to mount attacks in the real world.
A something innocent is turned into a problem situation, as researchers at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) has discovered and reported on recently.
In a recent ICSI technical report published May 2, Gerald Friedland and Robin Sommer said they were able to identify where images posted online were captured. That's because the information is automatically embedded by higher-end digital cameras and iPhones. People who post these images at these locations are unaware of these risks.
Friedland and Sommer analyzed this information by cross-referencing the latitude and longitude embedded in images with publicly available information, such as Google Maps Street View, to immediately determine where the photos had been taken. By doing this, they were able to identify the home addresses of people who put photos on Craigslist, even though they had opted not to identify their real names and email addresses.
The researchers were able to do the same thing with YouTube videos and could find users with homes near downtown Berkeley by searching embedded geo-location data. Since many videos were of children, the researchers followed up by searching for videos posted by the same users that had been filmed over 1000 miles away. By doing this they were able to find a resident of Albany, California who was vacationing in the Carribbean along with other users. This left them open to burglary.
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