Malwarebytes Revisits Geolocation Metadata In Our Toys

[Frank Woods]

Metadata is data about data, imbedded in that data.

 

 

 

Confused yet? Files can have information about themselves, contained within them. It can be simple information, such as genre or artist in the case of an mp3 music file. It can also have more complex information, like camera model, aperture of the lens, and GPS data in relation to a picture.

 

Metadata has been in the news recently, with the revelation that the National Security Agency (NSA) collects a lot of metadata about American citizens and foreigners.

 

Many people do not know that this hidden data exists and that this is where it can be an issue. If you take a picture with a device, then post it to a social network, you could be unwittingly advertising your exact location.

 

 

This happened not too long ago, when a reporter who was interviewing John McAfee posted a picture that contained geotagging metadata. This effectively pinpointed exactly where they were when the interview took place. There are arguments concerning whether this was done intentionally or not, but it certainly demonstrates how powerful this metadata can be.

 

Projects such as icanstalku.com showed that GPS coordinates could be harvested from pictures posted to online services. This helped raise awareness on the potential risks associated with unwittingly sharing more information than intended. Many manufacturers have modified their default settings since then. Some have disabled geotagging by default, while others have implemented a more granular approach, in which individual applications request permission when required.

 

It is always a good thing to revisit problems, to see if things have changed. And so, I set about collecting any Internet-enabled device I could that had a camera attached to it and verifying the geotagging settings in each of them.

 

Complete details and photos on different devices is available at :

 

http://blog.malwareb...ta-in-our-toys/

Edited July 2, 2013 by Frank Woods

[Guest LilBambi]

Excellent article.

 

Here's just a few more:

 

WONDERING WHAT HARMLESS ‘METADATA’ LIKE THE NSA COMPILES CAN ACTUALLY REVEAL? GERMAN POLITICIAN SHOWS YOU - The Blaze

 

The term “metadata” has been tossed around lately, especially after the leak about the NSA’s classified programs last month. It’s a collection of allegedly harmless — and nothing too specific — data from phone and Internet companies. But what if that’s not quite true?

Prior to leak about the NSA, TheBlaze detailed just what this information could show about an individual when the government investigating phone records of Associated Press reporters and editors was a hot button issue. But now a German politician has taken it a step further, using six months of his own metadata to give a visual of what this information really depicts.

Malte Spitz, a member of Germany’s Green party, sued the telecommunication company Deutsche Telekom to give up 35,830 records of his data from 2009 into 2010. Zeit Online then compiled these six months of Spitz’s life on a map showing how many incoming and outgoing calls and text messages were had and how long he used the Internet.

 

What your metadata says about you - From MIT’s César Hidalgo, a new window on what your e-mail habits reveal - Boston Globe

 

For César Hidalgo, this national conversation about metadata couldn’t come too soon. A professor of media arts and sciences at the MIT Media Lab, Hidalgo has been obsessed with communications metadata for years. To him, metadata isn’t merely a technical issue, or a political one, but an emotional one—a cloud of knowledge about your behavior that, once you confront it, can literally change your life.

To make metadata more visceral, he and a group of graduate students are launching a new online project to help people visualize their own metadata, or at least one small corner of it. The program, called “Immersion,” asks users for their Gmail address and password; it then scans every e-mail in their accounts and scrapes the metadata to create a portrait of their personal network. With the circles and lines of a network diagram, it highlights the 100 people with whom you’ve communicated most, and shows how closely they’re connected to you and how thickly interconnected with one another in your mailbox. Unlike Google, or the NSA, the project also offers an instant deletion option: Remove your name, and it erases your metadata.

 

...

 

The project goes public June 30. Users can sign up at immersion.media.mit.edu. Hidalgo spoke with Ideas from the Media Lab.

 

Not sure if I would want to login to email with a man in the middle just for another form of collection of data... LOL!