Is your smartphone compromising your privacy?
Apps on your cell phone are convenient, and great ways to stay connected with friends, but in a CBS 58 investigation, we found those same apps can be used by strangers to track you down in a matter of minutes.
Facebook photos, instigram, twitter, and even the camera on your phone-- can put you at risk.
When you download an app, it often puts a location tracker on, unless you go into your phone and turn location services off for that app. To show us, Paul Hager, CEO of Information Technology showed us how a free online app that can track data from twitter and instigram, tracking where you are.
Hager says, \"Not only will I know where you are now, but I can predict when you might likely be at that same location on Wednesday at 2 o'clock.\"
Even posting a photo on social media has information embedded in the jpeg for a stranger to track you down.
Hager says, \"If you open it in a common application like picasa, it will tell you the date and location it was taken and when.\"
So I went to a popular lunch spot and started posting to see if he tracked our crew down. Within fifteen minutes he was able to track us down, simply by having on location services for each app in our phone. To protect your privacy make sure to turn off location services inside the settings in your phone, and next to each app, also turn it off in your camera settings. This should leave you protected.