Having three little girls means Kettering parent Kimm Lohrstorfer, has a lot of moments she wants to share on line. However, she didn't realize that posting photos during an innocent afternoon at the park can be dangerous.
"It’s the biggest thing I worry about and that’s how I keep everybody safe,” Lohrstorfer said.
Dr. Phani Kidambi is faculty in the Department of Biomedical, Industrial and Human Factors Engineering and is also the Director of Business Processing Reengineering at the Wright State Research Institute. He is an expert on finding and protecting online data. With a few right clicks, he can prove how easy it is to find information from photos posted to blogs and other web sites.
“I can just right click on something called an ‘EXIF viewer,’ and it tells me the date [the photo] was taken, the latitude and longitude, and the GPS coordinates of the particular location. It tells me the best guess address,” Kidambi said.
Facebook and Twitter have done a good job of protecting photos in recent years by stripping all the location data associated with them, according to Kidambi, but he does not have his own Facebook profile because of the risks associated with it.
"There is a reason Facebook is free. It's not because they want you to have fun. It's because they have all of your data, and it's just a matter of time before they start selling it," he said.
We learned that anyone can use information in your smartphone settings to find out where you live, work, and even shop for groceries. If your locations settings are all turned on, a stranger would just need to use your phone for a few seconds to gather your personal information.
“It’s scary. It’s truly scary,” Kidambi said.
Police in Kettering said it can be hard to find criminals who look for your data online.
“They might not be in a local area. They might be several hundred miles away. Set your filters at a higher level, and they're not accessible to someone who's stalking you,” Kettering police officer Ron Roberts said.
We showed several local parents how easy it was to find their home and, therefore, their children. They agreed they will all be looking more closely at their location and GPS settings in their phones right away.
"It's unbelievable. I had no idea that somebody can scroll through my phone and come to see us,” Lorhrstorfer said.
