Security notes: Protecting Location Data on Twitter
Post's URL: http://www.iransic.com/?p=en&pid=2010/01/security-notes-protecting-location-data.html
SIC- Tuesday January 5, 2010: On Wednesday Dec 23, Twitter
announced that it has acquired Mixer Labs, creators of GeoAPI, ‘a comprehensive
service for helping developers build Geolocation-aware applications’. This
essentially means users will be able to send tweets that tag their current
location to the message like a timestamp. Although the Twitter Geotagging
feature has been around since August 2009, combining this feature with GeoAPI
has excited a number of users and developers while raising some concerns about users’ privacy in Twitter. The concerns specially increase because of being able to view and locate twitters on Twittermap, a third-party application that, as PC World has pointed
out, may contain some location data regardless of how often users delete it.
The following note was sent to SIC by 'a friend of the movement from Europe’,
hoping that this valuable information would help #iranelection activists to protect their privacy on Twitter.
The Iranian movement for freedom uses Twitter extensively. Many activist and friends of the movement are twittering in Iran. In the past few days a special security problem concerning Twitter has become obvious, an issue that should absolutely be noticed.
The problem is that - as a result of an option in personal twitter settings -
the place of the used computer could be *localized*. And very unfortunately this localization is very precise.
It is strongly recommended that every twitter activist inside Iran read
the following and check about this security issue on own his or her twitter profile.
Please note that this option called geo-tagging is completely different from the Location entry on the Profile page, which is visible to public.
NOTES ABOUT GEO-TAGGING
Since a few months there is a new option in twitter called geo-tagging.
This option allows twitter to send localization information together with every
tweet by user.
Geo-tagging uses the quite well-known Global positioning system (GPS).
This GPS technic is the base for many other applications like the navigation
devices in cars.
But every twitter user can choose whether geo-tagging data will be added to his
tweets or not. For security reason of course every activist, member or friend
of the freedom movement in Iran should choose no geo-tagging.
HOW TO SWITCH GEO-TAGGING OFF
For experienced users it is quite simple. In the personal twitter
settings you find the option field 'Enable geo-tagging'. This option should
be unmarked, no cross in that field. If there is one, unmark it!
Near this field you find a link to an FAQ written by twitter about geo-tagging.
It's not long so it would be better to read to be sure what you are doing.
AND DELETE EXISTING LOC. DATA
After unchecking the field, please press the button 'delete all location data' below. This action will cut off all existing geo-tagging data of stored tweets on the twitter server.
If either the geotagging is on or location data has not been
removed from previous tweets, one would be able to locate users on Twittermap.
Here you can find a real-time list of twitters active in Iran-related hashtags.
#iranelection
| #sog |
#cn4iran
| #united4iran
