[HIB]Researchers Show How Twitter, Twitpic Make Stalking Simple

Ben Jackson and Paul Vet know where you live. Or rather, if you geotag your tweets and photos as carelessly as the average microblogger, they know where you sleep, work, and potentially engage in far more private activities. Both Jackson and Vet separately presented research at the Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE) conference in New York on Friday and Saturday aimed at demonstrating just how easy it is to track unwitting Twitterers using just a few pieces of metadata attached to their tweets or online photos. Jackson and fellow researcher Larry Pesce plan to release two tools, affectionately named Reaper and Stalker, that use Perl scripts to harvest data from the stream of location-tagged photos that are continuously posted via Twitter on services like Twitpic, YFrog, the more risque SexyPeek. Jackson says about 3% of the photos on those services include GPS tags showing the exact latitude, longitude and direction of the pictures--data that most users likely never intended to reveal when they snapped the photos on their GPS-enabled phone.

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