Of course, scrolling through photos can teach you a lot about a person’s interests, social life, beliefs, political views, and more. That’s just one way a photo posted on social media can illuminate the past - and other valuable information about your subject that’s not immediately visible to the naked eye. This is potentially valuable information, especially if the accident you’re investigating happened several years ago - say, the year that “memory” was posted. It shows you a photo memory you posted several years before, then gives you the option of reposting to your current feed. For example, if you use Facebook, you may have seen the “# of years ago” (“your memories” feature) pop up in your feed from time to time. And anytime they post, they’re unwittingly passing on more clues about themselves than they can possibly fathom.įor investigators, social media posts have always been a trove of information, and those posts and images can offer more data than initially meets the eye.
With the world in various stages of shutdown and emotions running high, folks are turning to social media to vent, break the isolation, and connect with the world. A careful investigation of social media posts, images, and their embedded metadata can help you piece together that fuller narrative. Users who prefer not to share these details should use one of the EXIF tools to erase image information.Every picture tells a story. Since most smartphones and digital cameras are equipped with GPS functions and some images include a geotag (a location tag) and IP address, users should consider whether they wish to publish their personal metadata on the World Wide Web. However, as of 2016, a court judgment has ruled that Facebook is required to leave the metadata contained in users’ photos unchanged after being uploaded in order to allow the authenticity of images to be determined.
Data security is both an important topic and a problem in relation to EXIF data.įor example, up until 2016, as much metadata as possible was removed from images after they were uploaded to Facebook in Germany to keep executable malware that could be contained in the metadata from infiltrating user devices and also to protect private data. I f these images are shared on social media or across other portals, certain undesirable details may be revealed in the metadata. Very few people are aware of just how much information a photo on our cell phones or a camera can reveal about us.
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