Privacy on Evan Hoffman

Disabling (or enabling) geotagging of photos in iPhone camera

Sun, 31 Oct 2010 00:48:23 +0000

Some people may not be aware that photos taken with the iPhone camera have the GPS coordinates of your location embedded in the EXIF metadata of the file. This means that when you post the picture online or send it to someone, you’re letting them know where you were at a certain place and time. If you’re ok with that then there’s no problem. But if you want to disable it, it’s pretty simple.

Using SSH tunnel & Squid to create a private encrypted proxy for true private browsing (mostly)

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 16:11:51 +0000

I once worked at this place where I got a stern talking-to for viewing non-work-related pages. It was around Christmas and I was doing my shopping online (since I left the house at 7 AM and got home at 8 PM). It’s not like I was farting around all the time. Anyway, the idea that I was being proactively watched by someone with an axe to grind pissed me off, so I decided I wouldn’t give him anything to read.

Facebook for iPhone - "Places" hangs on "Locating you..."

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 14:00:38 +0000

I decided to see how “Places” stacked up with Foursquare. I reactivated my Facebook account and reinstalled the iPhone app. Went to “Places” and clicked “Check In,” and… nothing. It mentioned something about turning on Location Services. I know I already have that enabled because other apps are using it without problem. Turns out you need to enable Location Services explicitly:

First, go to the Settings app and select General:

Facebook for iPhone - "Places" hangs on "Locating you..."

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 14:00:38 +0000

First, go to the Settings app and select General:

A less insidious way to use Facebook?

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 08:58:19 +0000

I deactivated my Facebook account a couple of months ago. I just kind of got tired of seeing silly updates from friends and “friends” - people I’d friended but wasn’t really friends with. I was also frustrated by the privacy implications of using such a service: you tell it about yourself, you tell it about who you know and how you know them, you keep adding more information about you and your friends to its huge brain that it’s free to use or abuse however it wants.

More thoughts on Google's tracking abilities

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 12:34:22 +0000

It all comes down to the cookie.

The Wall Street Journal recently began a series of articles called What They Know, detailing the different pieces of data that online marketing companies have about people as they traverse the web. None of this is really new, especially not to me, since I work in that industry. But I was surprised at some of the data that was present in the cookies right in plaintext:

More thoughts on Google's tracking abilities

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 12:34:22 +0000

It all comes down to the cookie.

The sinister side of Google's Picasa face tagging

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 09:34:53 +0000

So, let me start by saying that I love Picasa, Google’s photo organization tool. It automatically finds new photos as you add them to your hard drive. It lets you crop pictures, remove red-eye, adjust colors and make a few other basic edits that cover probably 95% of what most people need to do when editing photos. It lets you select a few photos from your library and email them to anyone with just a couple of clicks. It also integrates with Google Earth and Google Maps to show you on a map where a particular photo was taken (for those unaware, GPS-enabled cameras, including many mobile phone cameras [e.g., iPhone] embed your GPS coordinates within the EXIF metadata of the photo, so any person, program or website with access to the image will know the location at which it was taken).

The sinister side of Google's Picasa face tagging

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 09:34:53 +0000