Metadata Doxxing and You
We all love to snap pics and upload them to social media in the blink of an eye. "Hey, see, I look cool in this dude!”. But you can not be certain of when those dudes will start looking beyond your picture!
This is an example of a logo I created and uploaded to my Quora Space:
But there's nothing interesting, right? It's impossible to tell who is the creator and where he lives. But is that really the case?
Metadata is associated with every file ever created. It contains valuable information like the Creation Date, Modification Date, Name of the Device that was used for creation, the Creator's Name, and even the Software name that was used to edit this logo!
EXIF (Exchangeable Image Format) is such a standard for images. Let's take a look at the EXIF Data extracted from my logo!
You can see the last modification date, the creator tool named Canva, and most importantly my name under the Author Section.
If you were a creep (I know you aren't, my readers are cool!), a simple Google search would present you with a whole page of information and social media links directly related to me. It'd take you less than 10 minutes to find out who I am!
Sounds like a nightmare, right?
Shuffle Up Your EXIF Metadata
Scrambled EXIF is here to rescue as! It acts as an intermediary for sharing files. This app acts as a middleman when you share your files by just adding another step. When sharing your files, you just need to tap the share button as usual and select Scrambled EXIF app. Shortly the share popup with apps will appear again after Scrambled EXIF's magic process! To summarize, it's just three steps:
- Tap Share
- Choose Scrambled EXIF
- Choose the preferred app in the 2nd share popup.
Results?
Scrambled EXIF not only strips metadata from your files but also renames it with random strings. Why?
Because your phone sometimes names files containing dates and categories. For example, My phone saves Photos with this naming format: "YYYYMMDD-TIMESTAMP-PXL" That means, you can know the exact time of the capture and also the device model name.
But when I share the same logo above through Scrambled EXIF, the filename becomes: 394269db-d328-4ea9-8524-3880efb8df87.png and the metadata becomes:
Nothing Specific! It's that simple.
Resources
- Scrambled EXIF App - Play Store F-Droid
- What is EXIF - Wikipedia
- Repository - GitLab
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