Geo-Tagging Study Featured in The New York Times and New Scientist

August 15, 2010
CBS, The New York Times, Good Morning America, and New Scientist  magazine have featured the work of researchers Gerald Friedland and Robin Sommer. The researchers looked at geo-tagged videos and photos on the Internet that contain embedded longitude and latitude coordinates. Users are often unaware that these coordinates are automatically added to images by higher-end cameras or smartphones such as the iPhone. Friedland and Sommer cross-referenced these coordinates with publicly available information — such as Google Maps Street View — to quickly identify, for example, the home addresses of posters to Craigslist. One search of YouTube videos yielded (in fifteen minutes) a home in downtown Berkeley whose owner was on vacation. The work will be presented at the Fifth USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Security (HotSec '10) in August.

Read the conference paper here >>