Dark web drug sellers shutter location-tracking EXIF data from photos
Criminals have started to aggressively erase EXIF metadata from their photos to make it harder for authorities to locate them, Harvard University students Paul Lisker and Michael Rose find.
Unbeknownst to most, digital cameras and smartphones that shoot in JPG or TIFF formats write information on where a photograph was taken, when, and the camera used, every time the virtual shutter opens. That data is written in the "exchangeable image file format" (EXIF) standard.
The Harvard pair collected images of drugs and weapons taken by criminals and used in ads placed on dark markets and saved them to a data repository maintained by an independent security researcher Gwern Branwen. That cache contains some 83 dark markets and 40 associated forums from 2013 to 2015, totalling 44 million files or 1.5Tb of data.
