Skip to content

cs4fn

Computer Science for Fun

Tag: metadata

I know where your cat lives (privacy and metadata) ^JB

by Jo Brodie, Queen Mary University of London

Governments pass laws to protect their citizens’ privacy. They outlaw reading email, listening in to phone calls and accessing data without permission or a court order. If you really care about privacy though, you need to protect your ‘metadata’ too: data about data. The police and security services can learn a lot from metadata when they put their minds to it. Anyone else with access can too. You need to take care of yours (and that of your cat).

Picture credit: Fairytale Enchanted cat image by Prawny from Pixabay

Imagine you are on the run, hoping not to be found. You would make sure no one took a photograph of you that showed where you were, but you might think you were safe enough if you weren’t standing next to a distinctive landmark. Think again. John McAfee (who was on the run from the Police at the time), was located by a photograph, but not because of anything visible in the picture. It was because of the hidden metadata attached to it.

Metadata is all the indexing information that goes with data. So a film on DVD is actual data but the name of the film, the director, information about the actors, and so on – that’s its metadata. Similarly, the words you say in a phone call are the data, but who is calling who and from where is metadata.

With photos (the data), the metadata includes where the photo was taken and the camera it was taken with. Smartphones track very precise location information, and, unless you switch this setting off, this metadata of where it was taken is saved with the picture. If the photo is uploaded to a website, the metadata is uploaded too, and that’s what happened to John McAfee. A journalist interviewed him and took a photo, intending not to give away his whereabouts. However, he uploaded the photo which gave away the precise location in the metadata. This would have made it easier for law enforcement to catch up with him … had he not found out about the location-leak first and made his escape in the nick of time.

Location based services on smartphones are really useful. If you want to find out where you are, how far away something is, or use the inbuilt map apps on the phone to plan how to get somewhere, then you need to let the phone know where it is. But you might not want a photograph you take inside your home to share the information of where that house is to anyone who cares to know, stalkers and trolls included.

The website “I know where your cat lives” aims to make more people aware of the information they give away unintentionally. Plenty of people share photographs of their gorgeous pets on the Internet. Most also unwittingly give away the precise latitude and longitude of where they live. The site collects publicly available cat photos with their metadata and plots them on an aerial photo map, showing where each cat’s photo has been taken, and so likely where the owner lives

German Green party MP, Malte Spitz, went a step further and published 6 months of records kept (at the time by law) by his phone company about him. To emphasise how scary it was privacy-wise he published it in the form of a minute by minute interactive map, so anyone could follow his exact location (just like the phone company) as though in real time from the location metadata his phone was giving away all the time. The metadata was combined with his freely available social networking data, allowing anyone to see not just where he was but often what he was doing. Germany no longer requires phone companies to keep this metadata, but other countries have antiterrorist laws that require similar information to be kept for everyone. You can explore Malte’s movements at (archived link: www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention) to get an idea of how your life is being tracked by metadata.

Don’t just look after your cat, look after your cat’s metadata too (not to mention your own)!

 

Further reading

  • This Guy Is Cyberstalking the World’s Cats in the Name of Privacy (17 July 2014) VICE
    “… meant as part art project, part wake up call to people to scrub their photos of the EXIF metadata stored on every photo you take.”
  • This Website Knows Where Your Cat Lives (22 July 2014) TIME
  • I Know Where Your Cat Lives: Feline photo mapping website exposes how easy it is to track the owner’s location (21 November 2015) The Independent
  • How you told the internet everything about you without realising it (22 March 2018) ABC News

 

This post was first published on CS4FN and a copy can also be found on page 8 in ‘Keep Out’ – Issue 24 of CS4FN magazine, on Cyber Security and Privacy (you can download the full magazine free as a PDF here).

All of our material is free to download from: https://cs4fndownloads.wordpress.com

 

Jo Brodie cs4fn issues, Cyber security, issue 24 - Cyber Security, Privacy Leave a comment July 19, 2021 3 Minutes

Click below to find out more…

Front cover of CS4FN issue 28, called Cunning Computational Contraptions, with a black text on a white panel in front saying "Click to read our latest free magazine".
Click to read the latest issue of CS4FN magazine

Lego Computer Science

Click to read our Lego-themed series featuring pixel puzzles, compression algorithms, number representation, gray code, binary and computation.

Image shows a Lego minifigure character wearing an overall and hard hat looking at a circuit board, representing Lego Computing
Image by Michael Schwarzenberger from Pixabay

Recent Posts

  • Your own electrical sea: sensing your movements
  • Playing Bridge, but not as we know it – the sound of the Human Harp
  • Strictly Judging Objects
  • Cryptography: You are what you know
  • Cryptography: Shafi Goldwasser and the Zero Knowledge Proof

All previous posts

Recent Comments

Cryptography: You ar… on Cryptography: Shafi Goldwasser…
Understanding Ultron… on A Wookie for three minutes ple…
April Fooling with c… on CS4FN Advent – Day 7…
Lego computer scienc… on Lego computer science: represe…
Lego computer scienc… on Lego computer science: compres…

Archives

  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • September 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017

Categories

  • Advent Calendar
  • Ancient History
  • Animal Welfare
  • Art and Craft
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Artificial Life
  • Augmented Reality
  • Automata
  • Bayesian Networks
  • Biology
  • Brain-computer interfaces
  • Careers
  • Cellular Automata
  • Complexity
  • Compression Algorithms
  • Computation
  • Computer Graphics
  • Computer History
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Vision
  • Creative Computing
  • cs4fn issues
    • annual 2
    • ee4fn1
    • Issue 12 – Computing on the Catwalk
    • issue 13 – Facing Up To Faces
    • issue 17 – Machines Making Medicine Safer
    • issue 18 – Machines That Are Creative
    • issue 19 – Touch it feel it hear it
    • Issue 2 – The Magic of Computer SCIENCE
    • issue 20 – Ada Lovelace
    • issue 21 – Computing Sounds Wild
    • issue 22 – Creative Computing
    • issue 23 – The Women are (still) here
    • issue 24 – Cyber Security
    • issue 25 – Wearable Technology
    • issue 26 – Serious Fun – Peter McOwan
    • issue 27 – Smart Health
    • Issue 28 – Cunning Computational Contraptions
  • Cyber security
  • Data Representation
  • Design for All
  • Diversity
  • Electronic Engineering
  • electronics
  • Encryption
  • English and Computing
  • Finance
  • Genetic Algorithms
  • Healthcare
  • History
  • Humour
  • Image Representation
  • Interaction Design
  • issue 15 – Does your computer understand you?
  • Law
  • Lego Computer Science
  • LGBTQ+
  • Linguistics
  • Machine Learning
  • Media Arts Technology
  • Microprocessor design
  • Mistakes and errors
  • Mobile Computing
  • Movies
  • Music
  • Networking and Communications
  • Networks
  • Number Representation
  • Optics
  • People
  • Privacy
  • Programming
  • Regular Expressions
  • Robotics
  • Safety-critical systems
  • Sensor Technology
  • Sentiment Analysis
  • Simulation
  • Social Networks
  • Space
  • Sport
    • Basketball
    • Football
  • Steganography
  • swarm intelligence
  • Uncategorized
  • Wearable computing
  • weather
  • Women in Computing

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com
Blog at WordPress.com.
  • Follow Following
    • cs4fn
    • Join 3,512 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • cs4fn
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...