Finding a celebrity’s location using their twitter username

Using a celebrity’s Twitter username, ZaaLabs was able to scrape GPS data from many of their photos, including places of residence.

…Last week one of my favorite video podcasts, Hak5, had a segment on Exif data mining (Episode 721). In the episode Rob Fuller (a.k.a. Mubix) shared his experience, how his images contained unwanted GPS information embedded in the Exif headers.
While mining Exif information from images is nothing new (Version 2.1 of the specification is dated June 12, 1998) most consumers don’t realize the kind of information attached to their images by default.
In February of this year, Johannes Ullrich over at ISC published a paper titled Twitpic, EXIF and GPS: I Know Where You Did it Last Summer. Johannes explains:
Modern cell phones frequently include a camera and a GPS. Even if a GPS is not included, cell phone towers can be used to establish the location of the phone. Image formats include special headers that can be used to store this information, so called EXIF tags.
So after watching the segment, I was curious how widespread the issue is and decided to conduct my own investigation, codenamed Seeker.
Harvesting…

Read the original here:
Finding a celebrity’s location using their twitter username

Related posts:

  1. Twitter Location API to Support Places
  2. Is Twitter a River of Content or Garbage?
  3. Twitter.com Now Lets You Tweet Your Location
  4. How Companies Are Using Your Social Media Data
  5. Twitter Turns On Real Time Location Feature - But What Is Th

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Leave a comment