What Your Photos Can Tell About You To Complete Strangers

…or why you should be careful when sharing your photos online.

For whatever reason, most people still firmly believe that the Internet is a safe space. Otherwise, why are they still sharing their travel plans, intimate thoughts, and photos? To make matters worse, each file shared online, be it a photo, PDF, or text document, comes with a lot of hidden information that can tell a lot, and I mean a lot, about its owner. And if the documents don’t have a lot of precious data attached to them, photos usually do. From a location to date, time, device, and even information about whether or not this picture was altered, your picture can tell a lot about you to anyone, even a complete stranger.

Let’s see how the free online tools expose this precious information, what we can learn from one random picture, and how your phone allows editing or hiding the information that you don’t want to share with the world.

Find all metadata online

A simple Google search will reveal that there are dozens of free tools out there that will expose most of the metadata. Here is one of the most popular tools — Metadata2Go — that allows uploading a photo or a document and getting all the juicy details. Location? Yes. Date and time? Yes. Do you…