turbowebguy blog

Posts Tagged ‘danger of gps’

Bit of a back story, for those who don’t know or care, Apple Computers is having their MacWorld Conference and Expo (2009) at the Moscone Center in San Francisco California where they unveiled “Life ’09″.

People (with any brains) should be worried about this technology identifying you any place anytime (and the data is easily manipulated i.e. a doctored photo would be very easy to do) and a definite record you were there, scary.

“Life ’09 will include a feature called Faces that finds and organizes a gallery of a user’s friends in his or her photos, thanks to face-recognition software, Schiller said. A feature called Places will organize pictures around where they were taken, he added.This would be accomplished through an interactive world map with GPS geotagging that will pinpoint the location of every photo users take, as long as they have a GPS chip in their camera or iPhone.The iPhoto database will recognize the location of snapshot and match it thanks to Google Maps’ technology.”

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/01/06/macworld.keynote/index.html

Why worry? Here’s why. Most people do not know or care to know they just want it now right?

Your Digital Camera might be cute.

Maybe you got it from Mom and Dad for X-Mas.

Every Digital Camera has a Serial Number.

Every photo you take is stamped with that serial number along with date, time, whether or not the flash was used, seriously.

Apple wants to add GPS locatable photos in the mix. So what you say?

If you have a photograph from your digital camera, and I’m not just talking about Raw format (JPEGS have it too!!!), open it up in Gimp (www.gimp.org), Photoshop (www.adobe.com), Adobe Bridge, click on it, right click on it, go to the properties whatever that little picture you took has additional data attached to it.

I’ve inserted a screen shot from Adobe Bridge a photo I took with my Olympus SLR.

There was a front page article last month from a the national association of criminal defense lawyers (The Champion) on “Fingerprint Fabrication” how cops have used it, gotten away with it. We also know that DNA can and has been falsified and that it is very difficult to counter “expert witnesses” in court cases as it is. Imagine this…

I have a high-res picture of a politician smiling at a dinner party.

I have a high-res picture of a bar.

I superimpose the politician in the bar, do some lighting work, modify the metadata to the time and date I want, add the GPS coordinates and that’s it, I have undisputable proof that he was in a bar drinking.

Get the picture (pun)?

Secondly, we all know GPS coordinates will tell you a GPS location, if you have an iphone with GPS tracking of your friends and think it’s cute to know where everybody is at all times, fine, don’t count me in.

Here’s a site that will pinpoint any GPS coordinates (amongst many) http://www.boulter.com/gps/

So we know young women especially get a digital camera and upload their photos to myspace and facebook like crazy, what about single moms posting pictures of their kids. They are leaving a public trail for anyone, any criminal, any pedophile, any angry parent, felon looking for that person of their kids and can locate them down to the centimeter. Does this pose a problem? I say absolutely.

Assuming there are ligitamte photographs of people trying to be friendly int their ignorance, we are being leveled down to a photograph record that anyone can have for future use, including the government. Scary stuff.

Bad Apple.