Geolocation & information ecosystems: Your safety reminders when posting cute pictures
... As well as non cute pictures too. You should stay safe posting those as well.
My initial attraction to open source investigations ignited because crazy people love me. They especially love to cyber-stalk me. It’s not a good feeling, but I began to realize that I could easily cyber-stalk them right back.
Is this behavior always cool and healthy? Not exactly. But it can be very helpful if you need a mean, saber-toothed lawyer to send a cease and desist letter to some dweeb trying to harass you from behind the shield of anonymity online.
It is also helpful to reverse-engineer the intel gathering process, in order to understand how to better protect yourself online. This is why I post pictures on my Twitter and ask my followers to both geolocate them and tell me what other kinds of information the pictures convey.
Here’s a game we played recently:
If you’re new to this topic, you might think that this picture doesn’t give away a lot of information. This is not correct. I was geolocated in a matter of THREE minutes this time:
Yes, that’s the building I was standing not far away from when the picture in my tweet was taken. The location is the C & O National Historic Park (which is often overlooked and is absolutely lovely, just by the way).
If you’re just tuning into how geolocation works, this might seems like magic. Three minutes? Really?
Here are a few things to bear in mind:
Even if it didn’t take three minutes, I would have been geolocated eventually. Take note of this tweet if you need to understand why:
You have to zoom in on the picture to see the details, but they’re all there. This illustrates the point I keep hammering home with this newsletter — seemingly innocuous details can and will give away your location.
However, just as no man is an island, neither is a picture on the internet. I don’t like fancy expressions, as they can often turn people off from seemingly complex material, but please bear with me here: Your images exist in a certain information ecosystem.
What does this mean? Well, let’s use me as an example. I live in Washington D.C. I state as much in my Twitter profile. Most of the people inclined to play geolocation games with me on the internet already know that. Not only that, but there is the fact that a lot of people who live in D.C./are familiar with D.C. follow me. This can and will dramatically narrow down their list of options as they seek to geolocate me.
As time goes on, we will play more complex games, and I will show you how you don’t need to know a damn thing about a person’s general vicinity in order to place them on a map. Until then, again please consider following people like Carlos Gonzales on Twitter, who can do this in his sleep.
The information ecosystem, however, is not restricted to locations on the map. This is why I especially liked this response to my tweet:
Look at this man! He remembers that I have IT band issues, which is definitely something I have tweeted about before. Example:
He wasn’t focusing on location, he was focusing on lifestyle, and that’s important, because even if you’ve managed to keep your location under wraps, you may be giving a ton of other information away.
In fact, if you have a Twitter, you should now that it’s easily searchable. It’s something that a lot of laypeople don’t realize, because Twitter doesn’t seem like it is, but that’s just a kind of interface mirage — and furthermore, there are tricks to make Twitter search much easier for you, and yes, there is advanced search on Twitter, the existence of which, I realized, a lot of people simply don’t notice.
Another thing I really wanted to do with this game is for people to pay more attention to our clothing, specifically the patterns and such. Not a whole lot of that occurred, besides the focus on running shoes, but at least someone noticed the Nationals cap on my son:
I’m going to try to use even more distinct clothing in upcoming tweets to show you just how in depth clothing analysis can get.
Why am I doing all this? Again, I am here to make you aware of potential safety issues that arise when posting pictures on the internet. I’m not here to make you paranoid, nor am I here to teach you some dangerous open source Dark Art.
Staying informed means making informed choices. Making informed choices means sleeping more easily at night. Well, as easily as we can all sleep in 2020.
Please be on the lookout for more newsletters and please remember that signing up for a paid one, which is just $5 a month, helps me help you.