Gadgetory

if you are one of the millions of smartphone users who put your photos online you may be posting a lot more than just images early show consumer correspondent Susan Koeppen is here with a serious morning it seems everybody's using their phone to post pictures nowadays it's happening all the time so with the touch of a button you can show the world your photos but you can also be revealing information you may not want to share like the exact location of where you live work play and go on vacation there are more than 100 billion photos currently posted online with thousands being uploaded every minute from kids to pets vacations and graduations you and Jennifer minor of a mom and a blogger who puts up photos all the time you're posting pictures of your kids your home vacation spots wherever I am here's the vacation gals but what you see online is only half the story most smartphones have a GPS chip built into them so when you're taking a picture it actually takes your location stores it on that photo jon rettinger is a technology expert he says the same technology that helps people see real-time traffic updates and find directions on their phones also leads to GPS coordinates being attached to pictures and not only can you know exactly where was taking you know exactly the time that the picture was shot and all it takes to find someone's location based solely on a picture is the right computer program in just a couple of minutes so how easy is it to do this extremely easy if you know where to look it's one button to hit download and you are done we decided to see just how easy it really is a producer took pictures of just my face at locations around Los Angeles we posted them to my Twitter account and asked rettinger to figure out where I was oh you were shopping on Rodeo Drive haha right outside of the Louis Vuitton store enjoying the beautiful Southern California weddin wow that's where I was right there I was right there just by right clicking on all of the photos rettinger was able to pinpoint my locations and here we have your GPS coordinates almost exactly where it was taken here we are looks like you were a great park I was can tell that you were right at grauman's chinese theater that's exactly where i was so if you had somebody who had bad intentions out there they could easily track you absolutely with more than 70 million Americans currently using smart phones smart phone tracking has become a hot-button issue just this month executives from Apple and Google were questioned about it on Capitol Hill but the good news for smartphone users jump right into your setting turning off the location of your pictures flip that off you're done is easy oftentimes years go to settings and it says geolocation and you switch it off and that is it that's all you need to do what does she have that's something Jennifer minor plans to do on for blackberry it's a good picture up until now she had no idea her pictures could be tracked you never know what somebody's thinking of course so why take chances better safe than sorry and it's interesting to note that our expert had never tried to read the location of a picture before but he said it took him a total of ten minutes to get the right program off the internet and then learn how to do it and once we posted our pictures it took him less than 30 seconds per picture to find my locations Erica it's just creepy to use one word to describe it so we saw briefly in your piece the expert was showing us how to turn off these settings so people can't figure out where you are walk us through that if you would okay so we used an iphone to take our pictures so what you're going to do is you're going to find settings go to settings then you're going to go to general then you're going to find location services and where it says camera you just want to have it turned to off make sure it's on up i'll be doing that as soon as we finish here Susan right