Okay, this is sorta creepy — and if you aren’t aware of this little fact by now, you should be: Unless you’ve adjusted the settings to turn this feature off, every time you snap a photo with your iPhone it embeds data with your exact location in the image file. This data, called a geotag, can be easily read using easily available software by anyone who has access to your images online (btw, contrary to what the folks at NBC say, it’s not new technology; the ability to geotag photos has been around since at least the first iPhone to include GPS, the 3G).
Got an iPhone and a Windows computer? Lucky you, there’s actually a free Windows utility that does the same thing called Geotag Security. Of course, preventing your photos from being geotagged in the first place is easy: Just launch System Settings, tap on Location Services, scroll down to the “Camera” switch and set it to “OFF.”
