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4.3 Communicating Through Social Media

What you may not know about Twitter is that the site automatically includes location data
when the Twitter setting geotagging is enabled, which is a feature that allows a website to
identify information about your location. In 2013 a University of Southern California graduate
student built an application that analyzed more than 15 million tweets over a 1-week period.
The study revealed that 20% of tweets revealed the users’ locations, and the information was
publicly available. The researchers found that even when users chose to disable this setting,
many revealed their location by name-dropping something such as a restaurant or through
metadata in photos (Gates, 2013). Metadata might be defined as “data about other data.” For
example, metadata might be information about a picture such as who took the photograph,
where it was taken, a street sign, or other identifiable information in the photo itself. Corpora-
tions and intelligence groups use this information to create user or target profiles.

Fortunately, these researchers also developed a tool to give users the ability to review their
own Twitter accounts, view their own risk, and manage it (see Strategies for Success: Keeping
Your Location Private on Twitter). If the tweets have any location data in them, they will show
up as points on a zoomable Google map, and users can retrieve information about where they
were when they revealed their location. You can view these combined bits of location infor-
mation, called your geosocial footprint, to learn about your past sharing habits and privacy.
If you have a Twitter account, you can use this free tool at http://geosocialfootprint.com.

Strategies for Success:
Keeping Your Location Private on Twitter

To avoid giving up too much information, an article in the Huffington Post, an online news
aggregator and blog, suggests the following:

• Check your Twitter account security and privacy setting to see if you have checked “Add
a location to my Tweets.” If you have, uncheck that box and save changes or delete all
location information on your account.
• On your Twitter settings page, view other applications you may have authorized to
access your Twitter account, such as Foursquare, a social network website that helps
users find places to connect with other people. You can revoke the authorization for
individual apps, if you wish.
• Be careful when posting photos you take with your smartphone. GPS coordinates
are usually embedded in the photo metadata, unless you disable geotagging on your
camera.
• Be careful about tweeting an image that identifies you at a specific location (Gates,
2013).
Reflection Questions

1. What are some of the pros and cons of having GPS coordinates enabled on your
camera?
2. What types of problems have you or someone you know had with unauthorized access
to your social media accounts?
3. What are some advantages of geotagging?

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