Exposed by Metadata - The Vice and John McAfee incident Your photo metadata is being stored on the company's servers, which puts the data at risk of being misused, leaked, or hacked. And, even when services like Instagram expunge metadata from photos to prevent it being publically available to other users, the harsh reality is that the company itself is still holding onto that data for their own use. This kind of information could put you at risk of stalkers, by allowing anybody to track you down. This is actually pretty risky because EXIF data exposes your personal information in such a way that anybody who downloads your photo could find out where you live, where you work, which gym you attend on a Saturday afternoon, etc. As a result, people don't realize that they are constantly sharing information about themselves with the world. The problem with photo metadata, also known as EXIF (Exchangeable Image file Format), is that it is invisible and often completely unknown to end-users. The more photos you share with those platforms, the more they know about you because of the photo metadata – and you can be sure that those platforms use your information for marketing purposes. This means that services like Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, and Pinterest (to name a few) can harvest vast amounts of information about where and when you take your photos. This information has the potential to negatively affect your privacy because each time you share a photo or upload it to the internet – your sensitive metadata is also divulged.

As a result, when you take a photo with a digital camera or phone, information about the GPS location where you took the photo, the device you took the photo with, the date and time that you took the photo, and the software used to edit the photo are all attached to the image. Unlike their traditional film-based counterpart, they often provide more information than what you get to see in the image itself. Digital photos are more than a snapshot in time.

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