You know what’s awful?
Fearing that your food has been… defiled in some way.
Which is why people were enraged in 2012 when a viral photo
was posted to 4chan of an unseen employee standing atop two
bins of the shredded lettuce speeding into your fast food.
A strange mystery without hint of who might have
done it or where, inspiring the looming dread of
paranoia to fester within the backs of our minds…
Until, you know, Burger King caught the
people involved regardless and fired them.
Wait, what?
How did they find them!?
You can’t even tell if it’s a Burger King
from looking at the image.
The same way that some tech savvy individuals were led
to wonder if these two pictures of Donald Trump were
staged, given that they were taken only ten minutes apart.
Despite how little information it seems
they reveal, pictures say a thousand words…
You’re telling me that I could
use a photo to track someone down?
Yes!
Meet John McAfee—
That name sounds familiar.
And it should, Howard, run a search!
Querying… John McAfee...
Result found.
Entrepreneur, computer programmer,
and creator of McAfee anti-virus.
THAT guy makes anti-virus software!?
Among other things, yes!
He himself came face to face with the danger that
stray photographs can pose when a photo was posted
to the internet during his time in Central America.
McAfee’s Bizarre Adventure led him to move to Belize
in 2008, where he was suspected of going all Breaking Bad,
which led to a local police raid on his home.
November, 2012, McAfee was listed as a person
of interest by the Belize government after his
neighbor was found dead in a pool of blood.
Upon seeing the police approaching his compound in
the jungle, he buried himself in the sand and covered
his head with a cardboard box, and then he waited.
For hours.
McAfee believed that the suspicious death had been
targeted at him but hit his neighbor by mistake.
So he went on the run, fearing that if police managed
to capture him, he would get the gulag treatment.
He feared that the Belize government was trying
to rid itself of him after he claimed to run
criminal enterprises out of a local town, and
refused to pay bribe money to a local politician.
Ok, that’s gotta be paranoia, right?
Well, that’s certainly what Belize’s Prime
Minister Dean Barrow stated, calling the
claims, “utter and complete nonsense.”
But paranoia or not, he seemingly vanished with
only a photo as evidence to his continued survival.
A photo that revealed that he
had in fact vanished from Belize.
Wait, wait, what?
How did they get a location from a photo like that?
I mean, I guess there’s a tree, but, c’mon!
Oh! Was it like that time Shia LaBeouf put up a flag
and then people tracked plane routes to figure
out where it was and then they trolled him?
Oh wait, don’t tell me that’s some kind of rare
tree that only grows in one specific place!
In fact if we enhance this picture I can take a look
at the leaves, and see the reflection in McAfee’s
eyes and determine that… I have no idea where this is.
No, no, nothing that obtuse.
Our culprit lies within the camera itself.
Like the camera spilled the beans?
But how?
That’s why I always say, never trust a camera!
They’re all narcs.
It’s metadata.
That’s exactly it, Howard.
Here’s the thing about cameras these days, they’re smart.
Unlike these two.
At least I can walk.
Tin can.
Meatbag.
Tin can.
Meatbag.
Tin can.
Meatbag.
Most digital cameras these days will write a
certain amount of data to any photo they take.
Now with DSLRs, it’s fairly standard to see information
for shutter speed, aperture, and ISO settings.
That is to say the lighting settings used by the camera.
This data is also known as EXIF data, which
is short for “EXchangeable Image File format”.
Most photography focused social media sites
like flickr and 500px will show this data,
and you can also view this information in the
properties of a photo file on your computer.
But how can you find out where someone is with just that?
Some cameras are just smarter than others, right Brew?
That’s correct.
Cameras like, say, the one in your smartphone!
Phones today have advanced GPS systems that can
track you down to an exact longitude and latitude.
And that goes straight into your EXIF data
when you take a photo with GPS tracking on.
Is that what happened to that McAfee guy?
You'd think someone who made antivirus would think of that.
Well, he wasn’t the one that posted the image.
During his time on the run, McAfee was visited by
Vice editor-in-chief Rocco Castoro and photographer
Robert King who took a photo of Castoro posing with
McAfee which was then posted in an article about the
antivirus magnate’s time on the run, including a body
double who had been arrested at the Mexican border
with a Hermit Kingdom passport under McAfee’s name.
Which was apparently a ruse to obfuscate his actual location.
That’s… out there.
Internet sleuths looked into the image and found out
that Vice kind of sort of forgot about the EXIF data.
Ohhhh, and it like, told people about
what kind of camera it was taken on?
In addition to the device information and camera settings,
the photo had details on where and when the photo was
taken, down to the exact longitude and latitude he
was at when they ‘snapped the pic’ as the kids say.
I think everyone says that.
Namely, in Guatemala, which is not Belize.
At first, both McAfee and the photographer tried to
claim that the location included in the EXIF data
was a ruse meant to mislead those looking for McAfee.
Which, itself was actually a ruse.
The data was correct, and McAfee soon had to hire
a lawyer because he’d, you know… Snuck across
the border into Guatemala without his passport.
I mean, c’mon.
So, how do you look at this EXIF data anyway?
It’s pretty easy.
Generally you just download the photo,
and view it’s properties to see details.
So if someone sends you a photo from their phone
of some amazing looking coffee, you can find
out everything from what model of phone they’re
using, to which cafe they’re at right now.
If it has GPS coordinates, you can just plug those
in and… Lifehack is in the Hillside dumpster.
Huh.
Lance is in the alley behind the Don McRon’s burger joint.
Oh look, Spill’s at home.
Charles is in the dumpster.
I mean, we saw that right?
This might be too much power.
Well, many popular social media sites like
Facebook, Imgur, Instagram, and Twitter
prevent other users from accessing your data.
Can’t help but notice the emphasis on “users” there.
Well, yes.
In the words of Hany Farid, a professor of Computer
Science at the University of California, Berkeley: “You can
almost certainly be assured they are not throwing it away,
given that they’re basically big data vacuum cleaners,”
Which was confirmed by a Facebook
spokesperson in an email to Consumer Reports.
In the statement, Facebook said that they do
collect, quote, “information like the make and model
of the device used to take the photo, the camera
settings, and the date the photo was taken… to make
your experience better and to keep people safe.”
Gee whiz, I feel safer already.
Ok, but, there’s gotta be a way
to remove that EXIF stuff, right?
Right you are.
If you’re using a PC, there’s a button at the
bottom of the “details” page that shows you all
the EXIF data that your picture contains that
reads “Remove Properties and Personal Information”.
Using that, you can either create a copy of the
file with all information removed, or choose
what data you want removed in particular.
If you’re using a smartphone, there’s a setting that lets
you turn off the location data for pictures when you take
them, and of course, there are plenty of apps out there
for Mac, iOs, Android, and PC that will allow you to remove
all the data you want from as many pictures as you want.
So what happened to our subjects who had
their locations leaked via photographs?
Well, in the case of John McAfee… he was arrested in
Guatemala, and then expelled to the US on a flight to Miami.
He remained a person of interest in Belize and
was later found liable for his neighbor’s death
in a lawsuit, though not in a criminal trial.
He was later arrested in the Dominican Republic for
possession of illegal firearms on his yacht in 2019.
He ran for the United States Presidential election in
2020, though he later ended his campaign and instead
asked to run as Vice President for Vermin Supreme.
Most recently, he was arrested by the
United States in 2020 for tax evasion.
In the case of the Burger King lettuce boots, the
culprits decided to upload their image to 4chan.
A website that does not remove EXIF data,
and whose denizens were… upset at the idea of
someone standing in their burger components.
The users used the geotagging data to determine exactly
which Burger King the photos had been taken at, and
went about informing the company and the local media.
Yeah… the three employees got fired.
No matter how comfortable we may have become with them,
it’s important to remember that much of the technology we
use on a daily basis will keep tabs on us, if allowed to.
And if we want privacy, we have to
keep an eye on what settings we use.
Don’t want to be tracked?
Turn off your GPS, double check your photo settings, and
maybe check out our video on cyber security and whether
or not your devices are listening to you right now.
After all, a picture can say a thousand words,
but sometimes it just needs one — “Fired”.