One famous example involved John McAfee (founder of McAfee antivirus) who was tracked down by authorities after an unscrubbed image of him was posted online. Stalkers could determine your whereabouts in real-time and government agencies could track your exact location.

See also A Picture is Worth a Thousand Data Points For example, if you frequently post images to social media, then location, date, and time information could help snoopers track where you tend to be on a certain day or at a particular time. While much of this data is fairly harmless, some of it can present privacy risks.

Settings such as aperture, shutter speed, and ISO speed.

Location information in the form of GPS coordinates.

Some information you can expect to see includes: The data associated with an image will depend on the device used to capture it as well as any programs that may have been used to alter or edit it. This data is stored in a format named EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format). Most images captured on a digital device will have some metadata stored with them. What is EXIF metadata and what are the risks? We also provide step-by-step instructions for removing metadata from images on a range of devices and explain how you can go about changing settings to ensure no location data is stored in the first place. In this post, we reveal more about the types of metadata associated with images and why you should remove this information. You may even be able to change the settings on your device such that limited metadata is stored by default. It’s also a good idea to remove any potentially sensitive information from images that are stored in an unsecured location such as in an unencrypted cloud platform or on the device itself. Thankfully, it’s relatively straightforward to remove metadata from images before you make them public. If you post that image online as is, snoopers have full access to that data, causing privacy issues for the owner and subjects of the image. Depending on the device, this could include location coordinates, date, time, device model and manufacturer, and settings used to take the image. When you take a picture, most digital devices will store at least some metadata (known as EXIF data) connected to that image.

Best exif data viewer apps