160 Discussions and CommentsMember since Jan. 25, 2012
Netherlands
Dear collectors,
I have been a member of this forum for a few months now and I must say I thoroughly enjoy informing myself about the watches I one day hope to own. Many fantastic pictures from equally fantastic timepieces have been posted, for example in the April picture contest. However, there is something that worries me and which I would like to share with you this late evening.
With the invention of mobile phones there has been a great increase in the ease with which pictures can be taken and shared with other people through various media. This is in itself a great thing in my opinion. It is my experience, however that the large majority of people are not aware of the fact they are sharing more than just the visual information in the picture itself.
Attached to almost all pictures in the most commonly used formats, as well as many other files like music files, is a piece of metadata called Exchangeable image file format (exif). In short, this metadata contains information about the file like date and time it was taken, the type and settings of the camera, copyright information and since the advent of mobile phones a so called "geotag" which is the GPS coordinates of the mobile phone at the moment the picture was taken.
To illustrate:
In the April photo contest the following picture was posted by Skule
I use this picture as an example because the location, due to the nature of the photo, is very clear. In my Mozilla Firefox browser I have an Exif viewer add-in. A simple right click -> view Exif data reveals the following
My particular Exif viewer provides a link directly to the GPS locaton on google maps. This reveals the photo was taken at the northwest corner of parliament square.
In this particular case the information does not tell me a great deal about Skule (which is why I used this picture as an example), apart from the fact that he was in London, which I could have derived from the picture itself and he has an impeccable taste when it comes to timepieces.
It does not take a lot of imagination to come up with situations where the location of a picture, combined with other information has more harmful consequences. This is what worries me. With great watches, comes great desirability. Since this is a public forum, it is not only open to those admiring watches but also to those seeking to acquire without the accompanying negative cashflow. Those with bad intentions could very easily gather information with the method I described. I have seen posts on this forum showing pictures of multiple IWC watches, together totaling well over 50.000 USD in retail value, accompanied by phrases like "here are some pics I took in my backyard". I strongly believe this is a very bad idea.
Fortunately, from a sample of around 100 pictures I took from this forum only 5-10% contained GPS information in the Exif data. I suspect this is caused by people switching off their GPS because it greatly reduces battery life. Also, but I have not confirmed this, I read something about photobucket removing exif data from pictures that are edited with photobucket software (so not the originals).
Since I would not want to discourage anyone from posting pictures of your marvelous timepieces I advise you to click here to learn how to disable geotags and other exif data from mobile phone pictures.
It is getting late now and I have to go to sleep, so I will leave it at this.
2,996 Discussions and CommentsMember since April 2, 2011Hong Kong,
Hong Kong
Thanks Waimar for sharing. Photobucket has a setting to remove all geotags from all pics upon uploading by the user - that's what I have been using and I have been hoping that suffices.
Regards, Shing | email iwcforme1976 (at) gmail (dot) com time does not change us. it just unfolds us. max frisch. all that really belongs to us is time; even he who has nothing else has that. baltasar gracian.
I have been a member of this forum for a few months now and I must say I thoroughly enjoy informing myself about the watches I one day hope to own. Many fantastic pictures from equally fantastic timepieces have been posted, for example in the April picture contest. However, there is something that worries me and which I would like to share with you this late evening.
With the invention of mobile phones there has been a great increase in the ease with which pictures can be taken and shared with other people through various media. This is in itself a great thing in my opinion. It is my experience, however that the large majority of people are not aware of the fact they are sharing more than just the visual information in the picture itself.
Attached to almost all pictures in the most commonly used formats, as well as many other files like music files, is a piece of metadata called Exchangeable image file format (exif). In short, this metadata contains information about the file like date and time it was taken, the type and settings of the camera, copyright information and since the advent of mobile phones a so called "geotag" which is the GPS coordinates of the mobile phone at the moment the picture was taken.
To illustrate:
In the April photo contest the following picture was posted by Skule
I use this picture as an example because the location, due to the nature of the photo, is very clear. In my Mozilla Firefox browser I have an Exif viewer add-in. A simple right click -> view Exif data reveals the following
My particular Exif viewer provides a link directly to the GPS locaton on google maps. This reveals the photo was taken at the northwest corner of parliament square.
In this particular case the information does not tell me a great deal about Skule (which is why I used this picture as an example), apart from the fact that he was in London, which I could have derived from the picture itself and he has an impeccable taste when it comes to timepieces.
It does not take a lot of imagination to come up with situations where the location of a picture, combined with other information has more harmful consequences. This is what worries me. With great watches, comes great desirability. Since this is a public forum, it is not only open to those admiring watches but also to those seeking to acquire without the accompanying negative cashflow. Those with bad intentions could very easily gather information with the method I described. I have seen posts on this forum showing pictures of multiple IWC watches, together totaling well over 50.000 USD in retail value, accompanied by phrases like "here are some pics I took in my backyard". I strongly believe this is a very bad idea.
Fortunately, from a sample of around 100 pictures I took from this forum only 5-10% contained GPS information in the Exif data. I suspect this is caused by people switching off their GPS because it greatly reduces battery life. Also, but I have not confirmed this, I read something about photobucket removing exif data from pictures that are edited with photobucket software (so not the originals).
Since I would not want to discourage anyone from posting pictures of your marvelous timepieces I advise you to click here to learn how to disable geotags and other exif data from mobile phone pictures.
It is getting late now and I have to go to sleep, so I will leave it at this.
Kind regards,
Waimar
Waimar
Last edited: 26 August, 2012 - 22:26
Regards, Shing | email iwcforme1976 (at) gmail (dot) com
time does not change us. it just unfolds us. max frisch.
all that really belongs to us is time; even he who has nothing else has that. baltasar gracian.
Last edited: 8 December, 2012 - 16:07