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SALT LAKE CITY -- If you have a smartphone and it's GPS-enabled, the odds are good any picture you upload to the internet is telling other people where to find you.
It's called "geotagging." On many phones, the option is set "on" as a default. If your phone has that GPS capability, the metadata encoded with your photo when the file is uploaded includes information like latitude and longitude.
Columnist, "Nightside Project" contributor and tech writer Gregg Stebben says it's like telling someone right where you are at any given time.
"Oh! Thanks for your address," he explains. "I'll be over for dinner tonight."
The function has been around for a while, but came to light because of the experience of one of the men behind the Discovery Channel science show, "Mythbusters" -- Adam Savage. He posted a photo on Twitter of his Toyota Land Cruiser, parked in front of his house. Savage says he knew about geotagging, but he neglected to disable the feature on his iPhone.
Stebben says if nothing else, Savage is educating the public.
"It's good that we're talking about it, because people that are concerned about it will go turn it off and people that don't care will just yawn and say, ‘What's the big deal?'" Stebben adds.
The trouble is, it can be somewhat complicated to turn off the function. In many cases, you have to sort through many different layers of menus before finding the one that says "location," and setting it to "off." Then you could also be turning off all GPS functions for your phone, which may not be your intent.
A new website, I Can Stalk U, has step-by-step instructions for turning off geotagging on many popular smartphones. The site re-posts the "tweets" of people that may give away too much personal information in an effort to raise awareness about posting too much online.
E-mail: bbruce@ksl.com
