“I’m like, ‘I now know where you live, but I don’t really want to know where you live,’” Rajewski says. That matters to individuals-from college students to anyone selling things online-who communicate with people they don’t know well on the internet.Įxif data “can be a gold mine of information” that people don’t realize they’re sharing, says Jonathan Rajewski, a digital forensics expert and vice president at cybersecurity firm Stroz Friedberg, an Aon Company.Ī seller from Craigslist once emailed Rajewski photos of an item he was thinking of buying-with the Exif data still attached. If you email or text a photo, the Exif data will typically travel with it. “If you’re sharing images with people you don’t know or trust, you should be wary of whether or not you’re revealing sensitive information, like location data.” “There are some situations where you need to be careful,” says Bobby Richter, the leader of privacy and security testing at Consumer Reports. One thing we don’t know is whether he realized how much personal information he was posting online. For instance, the photographer shot with an iPhone X and had left the camera settings on auto. He was on a dirt baseball diamond behind a church in a small town in Ohio-a location we won’t name. Call up some GPS data, and you can learn where the boy was playing. As the shutter clicked, the time was 7:15 p.m. We can see that the picture is about a year and a half old the boy’s game took place on June 6, 2018. But download the file and click through some menus, and you can learn a lot. There is no caption, and few visual cues as to where or when the picture was captured.

He is partly in shadow, but his face is outlined in sharp silhouette against the sky. The boy stands at home plate in his Little League uniform, bat poised above his shoulder. There’s a particularly arresting black-and-white image of a boy on Flickr, the photo-sharing site.

Exif data remover