Geotagging

Have you heard about how your pictures you take on your smartphone can tell someone when and where it was taken? The new smartphones have GPS location capabilities on them today. This is helpful when you use the map application to find directions to a place or service. However, having the GPS capabilities on the smartphones equips the camera application with specialized location hardware known as geotagging.  So when photos are taken on a smartphone, the geotagging gives the time and location of the photos.  This can be great or it can work against your privacy, letting people you don’t know find out where you are. 

Geotagging can be dangerous for people especially teens because if an online predator has been watching your teen they are already observing their behavior and learning about their activities and whereabouts.  And when teens take photos they immediately or soon after post them on their social networking accounts. To protect teens, parents need to turn off the GPS capability on the smartphone so when pictures are taken and posted on social networking sites, online predators won’t have the advantage of seeing where your teen is hanging out at the moment. 

Many parents don’t want to turn off the GPS from their teen’s smartphone because they think it will help find their teen if him/her are taken by a strange. The truth is if an abductor does take a child and if he/she has a cell phone, one of the first things the abductor does is throw the cell phone away knowing it could track the child. So to help protect your child from online predators and meeting them face-to-face, it is wise to set the GPS default to off.  It is smart to periodically check the GPS setting because sometimes if your smartphone’ software is updated or turned off the GPS may turn back on.