How Apps Use Your Photos to Track Your Location
If you’re worried about apps tracking your location, that’s not enough to restrict the transmission of your location. You also need to restrict film sharing. If you’ve ever given an app access to your camera roll – to take photos, store screenshots, or any other reason – you’ve also let it see where all of those photos were taken. Felix Krause, iOS developer and security writer, created an app to demonstrate this back door:
Krause’s DetectLocations app for iOS shows how many apps can find out about your past (and future) location from the EXIF data of your photos. Give him access to the camera and he will show you where you took all your photos, if you were in the car when you took them, and your likely routes between each shooting location.
You can restrict access to past photos by moving everything out of the camera before giving permission to the app. But that won’t stop the app from spying on any photos in the future.
If this scares you, you can prevent it by turning off geotagging on your photos . As we explained in 2014, Android users can turn off geotagging in their camera settings; IOS users can turn it off in their privacy settings. Of course, then you won’t be able to make photo cards. There is no detailed setting to disable geotagging for third party apps.
Of course, if you’re already fine, constantly sharing your location with Google and Facebook, you can pass it to any app that needs access to one or two photos. It’s just good to be aware of how much information you are giving back.
Krause’s blog is full of such useful and intimidating safety tips. His latest post shows how, if you’re not careful, any iOS app can steal your Apple ID password . Cool cool cool.