A concerned correspondent (I’ll will keep him/her/them anonymous) forwarded the following YouTube video, asking me what I thought about it.
In summary: If you use a smartphone, and have location services (GPS) on it, and take pictures of your kids, then post those pictures online, THE INTERNET STALKERS AND MISCREANTS CAN SEE WHERE YOUR KIDS ARE … ER, WERE WHEN THE PICTURE WAS TAKEN.
We get several breathless TV news people talking to shocked, shocked, parents and police about this, and you can just imagine how disreputable, skuzzy old preverts in raincoats are surfing Flickr and Twitter, looking for little kids, then using the geolocation tags to map them out, ready to strike …
Um …
It’s good to know that you’re (possibly) including location info in your pix, and for that raw info the TV segment is useful. But turning it into an expose of How Your Smartphone Is Putting Your Kids At Risk (Film at 10!) is fear-mongering journalism at its most irksome.
So what they are describing is true (to a point) — a smartphone with location services turned on will, unless you change the settings, stamp each photo you take with a code for the location where you took it. That’s actually kind of a nice feature in a lot of ways (“Honey, what’s this a picture of?” “I don’t know, where did you take it?”).
It’s also true that this is relatively easy to disable — either by turning off the GPS (which, honestly, I leave off most the time any because it sucks juice on my Android like no tomorrow), or going into the camera application (or, alternately, into the location settings — your phone may vary) and turning off location stamping on photos.
(It’s also true that this is all explained in loving and simple detail in the manual for your smartphone. You did read the manual, right?)
But do you really need to turn off location-stamping pix in order to Save the Children? Are there armies of dirty old men out there, trolling for little kids on Twitter? It seems unlikely — the risk is no greater than, say, someone observing your kid on the playground, or at the park, or at school and then following the school bus home, etc. Good parenting to know where your kids is and to monitor them appropriately to be safe seems a good protection, regardless. Talking with your kids about strangers, ditto.
It doesn’t seem particularly probable that Evil Kidnappers are going to use Flickr or Twitter or Facebook to climb into your kid’s room at night, or snatch them away from the playground (if they’re being supervised). Especially since the vast majority of kidnappings and abuse are done by family members and people you already know (and who thus probably know where your kids room, favorite park, school, etc. are).
And, of course, even if you turn off the location feature on your smartphone, if you Tweet “Here’s my little Hannah on the swings” with the Smithers Park sign in the background, or Facebook “First day of school for Jason at Bubb Elementary,” you’re doing much the same thing. Or if your Flickr page is “The Geewilliker Family” and and you mention a first name and major metro area anywhere, folks determined to track down your little tot will be almost certainly able to look you up and find your address.
Alternately, just don’t post photos online. Or only post them (e.g., with Flickr) privately to family and friends. Who, of course, are more likely to be kidnappers and abusers.
How anonymized do you want to keep your life?
Now, there are perfectly good reasons for not geolocating your home from online, though it takes some doing — turning off the GPS stamps on your photos is a start, though not sufficient. Keeping your home life separate from your work might be one (no reason why your coworkers need to know where you live). Avoiding an ex might be another. Maybe not tempting thieves with pictures of your “brand new, $25K big-screen TV and Home Theater Setup!” is another one (especially if you then post that you’re “Off to the beach for the weekend! Woot!”).
But trying to keep your little kids’ location a secret — unless you have an actual reason to believe they are being targeted — doesn’t seem to me a terribly rational one. But I’m sure it keeps the TV news ratings healthy.
Free-Range Kids has commentary on this one, too, much more succinct than mine.