14 DAY TRIAL // Military officials warn staff members that the risks posed by social media are high. Sites and apps that rely on GPS features to reveal someone’s location imperil missions and even lives.
Social media applications and platforms are a lot of fun and their popularity increases each day, but with that popularity also comes a great threat, especially for someone whose location and other details should remain private.
US Army representatives are concerned with the fact that applications such as Foursquare, Gowalla, SCVNGR, Shopkick and Loopt are utilized by many staffers without taking into consideration the potential consequences the use of social geotagging may have.
“Today, in pretty much every single smartphone, there is built-in GPS. For every picture you take with that phone, it will automatically embed the latitude and longitude within the photograph,” said Steve Warren, deputy G2 for the Maneuver Center of Excellence.
Warren fears that every time soldiers upload a photo to a social media site, they could reveal their exact location and put their lives in the hands of someone who knows how to extract the metadata, and implicitly the coordinates, from that picture.
Unfortunately, this is not only theoretic. In 2007 a soldier made a picture of a new fleet of helicopters while they were arriving at a base in Iraq. The photos posted on the Internet allowed the enemy to conduct a precisely coordinated mortar attack, taking out four Apaches.
The experts believe that not only soldiers are at risk because of geotagging. They say that regular users who tag locations when making Facebook posts also endanger themselves, especially because of the new Timeline feature.
“A good rule of thumb when using location-based social networking applications is do not become friends with someone if you haven't met them in person," Sweetnam said. "Make sure you're careful about who you let into your social media circle,” Staff Sgt. Dale Sweetnam, of the Online and Social Media Division, said.