Metadata

Metadata is something people are not very familiar with. Metadata can be a very dangerous thing when it comes to data privacy and tracking. Metadata is data about data. How does that make sense? A picture can be taken on anyone's phone. This is a common occurrence. Have you ever went into the settings of that picture and clicked on details? If you take a picture of a duck in a pond in Central Park, for example, your phone can store metadata about the brand of your phone, what time you took the picture, if your flash was on or off, the shutter speed, and many other things about your picture.

Dangers
What makes this dangerous is that when taking a picture if you give permission for your phone's camera to access your GPS to tag your location of this photo, that is also metadata. This information can be found out if you post that picture onto the internet. Certain websites, such as Facebook, have sworn to their users that they delete this data. Why is this a big deal. If you take a picture somewhere and someone finds that picture online, they can know where you are. If you have posted other pictures from inside your house with your GPS on then they know where your house can be. So criminals can use this information against you to know when you will or will not be in your home. This can allow them then to break in. This can be really dangerous.

Getting Rid of Metadata

Luckily there are ways to get rid of metadata. You can use EXIF tools if you are familiar with those. If you are on your computer(running a Microsoft Windows operating system) and you have your picture, you can go to the pictures properties, and under details there will be what looks like a hyperlink under all the metadata. You can click this and it will erase most to all of the information from the photo.