online privacy

It can be fun ‘checking in’ at your favourite restaurant on Facebook, sharing pics of your hotel room on Instagram or buying and selling items on eBay. In fact – it can give you quite a buzz. But did you know that ‘geotagging’ (sharing your location via your pics or videos) can put you and your possessions at risk??

Keeping tabs on your favorite celebrities might be easier than you think -- and much easier than they want. But they likely have no one to blame but themselves. According to two teams of computer scientists, Hollywood stars could be unintentionally giving up the exact locations of their homes and private whereabouts through pictures uploaded to the Internet, leaving them wide open to attacks by tech-savvy thieves (not to mention unwanted visits by starstruck fans).

The International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), a non profit research organization in Berkeley, California, is due to present new findings next month regarding "cybercasing," a word researchers coined to refer to how geotagged text, photos and videos (those that include location information) can be used by criminals and other dangerous parties to mount real-world attacks.

When Adam Savage, host of the popular science program “MythBusters,” posted a picture on Twitter of his automobile parked in front of his house, he let his fans know much more than that he drove a Toyota Land Cruiser. Embedded in the image was a geotag, a bit of data providing the longitude and latitude of where the photo was taken. Hence, he revealed exactly where he lived.

Posting photos on social networking sites, like Facebook and MySpace, is a quick and easy way to show friends and family what you’ve been up to. Those innocent snapshots, though, could be revealing a lot more about your life than you think, potentially putting your home and family at risk, reports CBS 2′s Chris Wragge.