Posted on 08/25/2010 9:42:14 PM PDT by smokingfrog
On Aug. 13, three men entered and burglarized a Bridgeview home in Northwest Houston. The residents of the house, Windi Youngblood, Corey Phelps, and baby daughter, slept undisturbed through the night.
Suspects Jason Hamlin, Justin Hamlin, and Zachary Mckinzie, were caught by Precinct 4 constables less than 8 hours later. The constables found the suspects through an odd turn of events.
The three men had been broadcasting their GPS coordinates the whole time.
Phelps and Youngblood use a feature on their smartphones that link each phone to the other.
“We started using this feature to help keep up with the other. We can just look on our phones and see how far the other is from home.” Youngblood said.
When the family woke up and saw that their house had been burglarized, one of the things stolen, they noticed, was Youngblood’s cell phone.
“Corey immediately looked at his phone, and said ‘look!’ and on his screen it said I was near Holzwarth and I-45,” Youngblood said.
The family called police, but kept watching while awaiting help. They said the suspects traveled north nearing The Woodlands, and then headed back towards F.M. 2920. Eventually, the icon stopped near the 20500 block of I-45, right next to the Spring Lodge Hotel.
Shortly after, investigators found the stolen car in the motel’s parking lot. The motel’s surveillance showed two men exiting the stolen car at 6:45 a.m. Motel personnel further identified the suspects.
A warrant was issued and executed for the arrest of the driver, during which time two additional suspects were apprehended.
Investigators recovered the family’s property, but also found other stolen goods. The suspects were found to have been linked to a weeklong crime spree of burglaries in the NW Houston area.
(Excerpt) Read more at hcnonline.com ...
Excellent.
I tried it with an iphone photo sent to me, uploaded it, got the exif with my browser, went and found a website that converts GPS coordinates (- for west and south) into an address. From that, you can look up that address on mapquest or one of those sites.
There is a way to disable that feature but it wasn't a matter of just turning it on and off at will. It is one of those things that could be used for good or evil, but I can't help wondering why they would design so that additional information would be embeeded in a photo amd consider the possible dangers of revealing too much about your location to strangers on the web without even being aware of it.
It had to have been deliberate to go that far. Many photos reveal enough already but the exif is usually benign with camera settings, model and software. There is a way to save that will strip off the exif, or was, but those phone photos are not usually manipulated further in a graphics editor.
Here in So. Cal, we had a guy who was wearing an ankle band pending deportation burglarize a house. Same outcome.
Gotta be careful...
Web Photos That Reveal Secrets, Like Where You Live
August 12, 2010When Adam Savage, host of the popular science program “MythBusters,” posted a picture on Twitter of his automobile parked in front of his house, he let his fans know much more than that he drove a Toyota Land Cruiser.
Embedded in the image was a geotag, a bit of data providing the longitude and latitude of where the photo was taken. Hence, he revealed exactly where he lived. And since the accompanying text was “Now it’s off to work,” potential thieves knew he would not be at home.
Well the high tech geek basically found her address where the picture was taken, found out it was a family home, posted the address and phone number and then did a websearch to find all all the people who lived at the home, including a college aged young female.
He suggested that people might want to call the young lady and ask her out telling her that they have seen her up close and personal.
High technology that can do good for smart people with good intentions can really destroy dumb people.
I think that the high tech geek who presented all the details probably disclosed a little too much, but he was making a point and he really drove the point home.
Another more interesting example was someone who stole an I-phone from a geek on an airplane. He was able to trace its location and the recent calls from it. He found the address and who lived at the address. Then he did a back trace on the phone calls and recognized that some of them were family to one of the people living at the location where his I-phone now resided. He found out that they were probably illegal aliens. He called the relatives up and told them that they could call their relative and if he shipped the phone back nothing further would be done. If they didn't he knew where the thief lived and he knew where their family lived and he would make their life hell by calling various immigration agents and filing charges with the police and giving the police all the addresses, names and phone numbers. He gave the relatives a few days to talk sense into the thief. He then called the thief on the stolen phone and basically gave him an ultimatum to return the phone or else.
The phone was eventually sent to the guy by the their.
If you are smart you got to love technology. If you are dumb, well that is another story.
WHEN YUPPIE KIDS GO BAD !!!
No doubt. But this, honestly, is a feature. I have a Nikon SLR. To get it to record GPS, I have to buy an attachment. There are many other configurations and software that tag and read photos using GPS.
The purpose for photography is to be able to return to the spot as well as describe the photo by exact location.
Since phones have both GPS and a camera, it would seem natural to combine them. I'm only surprised they don't turn it off so they can charge extra to turn it on.
From cell phones to cell mates...
That didn't turn out to be the case, but how far are we from having our Onstar and GPS-cellphone records subpoenaed?
I wouldn't have known about that yet had I not read an article about it. That photo I experimented with happened to be of my grandson. Imagine what a perv or kidnapper could do with such information.
People plaster photos of their kids and family all over the web, especially on networking and sharingsites like Facebook. I warned my family that what you choose to reveal about yourself is one thing, but your network of "friends" can reveal more info about you, and it opens you up to all sorts of criminals and stalkers, etc., knowing when you'll be on vacation, going out for the night, etc.
That was cool how you got your phone back. The police don't have the time to handle these myriad of complaints over what would be considered petty theft, and likely wouldn't have done much about it anyway in your case. So justice was served. But I'll bet you never think of that particular phone in quite the same way again. You taught them a good lesson.
Somebody stole my gdauther's cell phone, and it always made me sad and MAD for her because she lives on the edge financially but is paying her own way. She never got it back. So I don't know if I'd go that far or not, I could be pushed to, but that was clever how you got your phone back.
Neat! Reminds of the woman who had her pictures automatically uploaded from her stolen laptop, which was taking pictures of the thief.
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