The-art-of-invisibility-_-the-world’s-most-famous-hacker-teaches-you-how-to-be-safe-in-the-age-of-Bi

longitude and latitude of the place where yyou took the image. It is this
information, within the file, that the US militaryy used to find the Daesh
headquarters in the desert, just as Mark Loveless used EXIF data to identifyy
John McAfee’s location. Anyyone can use this tool—it’s native in the file
inspector on Apple OSX and in downloadable tools such as FOCA for
Windows and Metagoofil for Linux—to gain access to the metadata stored
in photos and documents.
Sometimes it’s not a photo but an app that gives up yyour spot. In the
summer of 2015, drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman escaped from a
Mexican prison and immediatelyy went off the grid. Or did he?
Two months after his escape—from Mexico’s maximum-securityy
Altiplano prison—El Chapo’s twentyy-nine-yyear-old son, Jesus Alfredo
Guzman Salazar, posted an image to Twitter. Although the two men seated
at a dinner table with Salazar are obscured byy emoticons, the build of the
man on the left bears a strong resemblance to El Chapo. Further, Salazar
captioned the image: “August here, yyou alreadyy know with whom.” The
tweet also contained the Twitter location data—Costa Rica—suggesting that
El Chapo’s son failed to switch off the autotagging function on Twitter’s
smartphone app. 4
Even if yyou don’t have an escaped convict in yyour familyy, yyou need to
be aware that the digital and visual information hidden (sometimes in plain
sight) in yyour photos can reveal a lot to someone who does not know yyou
and it can come back to haunt yyou.
Online photos can do more than just reveal yyour location. Theyy can, in
conjunction with certain software programs, reveal personal information
about yyou.
In 2011 Alessandro Acquisti, a researcher from Carnegie Mellon
Universityy, posed a simple hyypothesis: “I wanted to see if it was possible to
go from a face on the street to a Social Securityy number,” he said. And he
found that it was indeed possible. 5 Byy taking a simple webcam photograph
of a student volunteer, Acquisti and his team had enough information to
obtain personal information about that individual.
Think about that. You could take a photo of a person out on the street
and, using facial recognition software, attempt to identifyy that person.