A massive increase of social media users checking into social networks is being exploited by mobile application makers and private detectives. These data can be much of a handful to help several concerns, as well as violating users' privacy.
Apple have stopped downloads of a mobile "stalker" application that told men where women are using publicly available information from social networks. But other readily available apps can do the same and more, say online investigators who use them.
When a person uses a mobile phone to post a tweet on Twitter or upload a photo to the image-hosting websites, geolocation data can be found underneath the tweet or photo. This geolocation data can be used to track down the haunted, including their home, where they study, and even where they usually are on daily basis.
"It is quite easy sometimes to work out which house a tweet is coming from," said Neil Smith, a former police officer turned online researcher in Britain.
Geolocation is the identification of the real-world geographic location of an object, such as a radar, mobile phone or an internet-connected computer terminal. Internet and computer geolocation can be performed by associating a geographic location with the Internet Protocol (IP) address, MAC address, RFID, hardware embedded article/production number, embedded software number, invoice, Wi-Fi connection location, or device GPS coordinates, and other self-disclosed information. Geolocation usually works by automatically looking up an IP address on a WHOIS service and retrieving the registrant's physical address.
Geolocation data can include information such as country, region, city, postal/zip code, latitude, longitude and timezone. Deeper data sets can determine other parameters such as domain name, connection speed, ISP, language, proxies, company name, US DMA/MSA, NAICS codes, and home/business.
Geolocation research is a fast evolving area as most applications are built on the back of freely available open-source software. The free app collates geolocation data attached to a person's tweets and pictures to figure out where they might work, said Smith, who says he uses it to track down perpetrators of insurance fraud for corporate clients.
Social networks like Twitter, Foursquare, Twitpic, Flickr, YFrog, Gowalla, and others can provide such geolocation data.
Exposure
Some of these websites allow users to disable geolocation, but some social networks like Foursquare and Gowalla depend on it. Twitter users can choose to enable it when they join and Facebook says it strips off the location data on photos.
Smith and other professional snoops admit that many people oblivious to geolocation data can find themselves unwittingly exposed.
Regulators in the United States and the European Union have come out in force for new ways to protect people's privacy online, but geolocation data on social networks seems to be at anyone's disposal without breaking the law.
"We have geolocation information that the users knowingly and deliberately make public," said Kakavas, who says he developed Creepy to show people how easy it can be for prying eyes to scrutinize their private lives.
"If you don't care about your own security then don't be surprised by tools which can harvest that information," Smith cautioned.
United States and the European Union regulators agree that people using the internet should have the choice to stop websites from gathering their data to send them targeted ads. To meet these demands advertising firms, web publishers and privacy experts have been meeting under the banner of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to write an updated version of "Do Not Track", a tool users can install on their browser to stop online marketing companies from gathering their web browsing history.
Geolocation is more difficult to deal with because where people are located may affect on how they are treated under the law.