Student Researchers Find Dating Sites Have User GPS Data on Photos

One of the problems with new technology is that sometimes it's difficult for non-technical types to keep up with what's going on. One of these instances is with GPS data that is attached to photo's taken by digital cameras and Smarphones that have GPS capabilities. What a lot of people don't realize, is that GPS data goes with a picture when it's sent to someone, or in this case, uploaded to a dating site. Thus, even if the picture is not of the person, it can still have data attached to it that those that are technically savy, can use to figure out where the picture was taken, and thus, perhaps where the person who took the picture is located. Because of this, student's at the University of Colorado's Leeds School of Business, decided to test photos people posted on various dating sites to see how often GPS data could be discerned from them. They have published their report on the schools website, and from all indications, it appears that the well known dating sites, such as eHarmorny and Match.com do scrub such photo's before they are posted, removing all GPS, and other associated data from the. Unfortunately, as KRDO television in Boulder reports on its website, most smaller such sites do not.

This is doubly dangerous, the news station reports, because smaller dating sites more often tend to be localized in nature, which means that the likelihood of someone trying to track someone down from information obtained from posted photo's is greater, due to shorter distances between those who post to the site, and those who might be looking to find out where they live.

The Colorado Daily expressed similar concerns after speaking with school business professor Kai Larsen, who said that while most online dating sites are very careful about not divulging personal information given to them by their user community, the same cannot be said for the data that is associated with photo's that are uploaded.

Indeed, KRDO reports that when contacted about this issue, many of the people running such sites weren't even aware of GPS information being posted along with photo's, which prompted some to respond that they would seek an immediate fix for the problem. The station also listed every site found by the research team as part of its report.

The Daily also noted that for users that wish to find out if photo's they have posted have GPS data attached, they can visit a site call regex and find out.