Photo Geotagging Security Risk

Do you take photos with your smartphone and post them online?
Innocent photos of your children or snapshots of family get-togethers that you want to remember are common on social media sites.

However, these photos pose a serious and dangerous privacy risk.
Thieves and criminals can find the exact location where your photos were taken, via the GPS on your smartphone – whether that’s your child’s bedroom or your favorite restaurant.
This security concern has been around for quite a while – but privacy breaches will continue, as long as geo-tracking is enabled by default on your family’s photos.

The software behind the photos includes geo-tags, according to Deep Medhi, a computer science professor at UMKC.
These are geographical tags that store where and when the photo was taken, similar to the type of technology used in GPS devices.
Your smartphone automatically stores the location where the photos were taken, whether it is at a local park, your child’s day care center, or even your own home.
Anyone can easily translate these geo-tags through browser add-ons that are completely free to download. The add-ons or apps turn the geo-tags into mapped locations to make it easier for human eyes to determine the location.

Technology is continually developing, and privacy is an ongoing problem – particularly for social media sites like Facebook. If you’re not careful, you could be giving criminals all the information they need to harm you
and your family. For now, make sure your GPS settings are set to the level of control that you want them, and be careful when posting pictures online. It takes just a free browser add-on to get more information than just the image shows.

How Do you Protect Yourself?
You can disable your geo-tags on your phones settings and any other social website using their control settings. If you need help trying to figuring it out, let us know and we can help you. I would easily post a "how to" but every device is different and every software is always updating and changing. Its just easier for us to help you right then and there.

Here is a Guide from the Niles Police Department. 

If you still need help disabling the geo tagging or you are not sure, give us a contact or a call :) We would be happy to help you. Better safe than sorry.

ATT & Verizon Privacy Collection Pro-out

AT&T is now collecting anonymous information about your account for external marketing and analytics. By default you're opting into the tracking, but it's easy to opt out.

Fierce Wireless reports that the opt out procedure comes after AT&T updated its privacy policy to show that they'll tracking and then selling certain behaviors on mobile devices. Here's the gist of what AT&T is collecting:

Here’s some of the information we collect:

• Account Information includes your name, address, telephone number, e-mail address, service related details such as payment data, passwords, security codes, service history, and other information like that;
• Network Performance & Usage Information tells us how you use our network, our products, and our services, and how well our equipment and network is performing;
• Web Browsing & Wireless Application Information tells us about the websites you visit and the mobile applications you use on our network;
• Location Information tells us where your wireless device is located, as well as your ZIP-code and street address;
• U-verse Information tells us about which programs you watch and record, the games you play, the applications you use and similar information about how you use our U-verse services and applications.

The good news is that opting out is easy: just head to this page, and click the "Check to Opt-out" boxes. 

For Verizon Users be sure you pro-out with this link http://www.vzw.com/myprivacy

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Prey App

As mentions before, protecting your devices from dropping, water, and heating is just the tip of the iceberg. When investing in your important toys you must also protect them from unwanted hands (robbers) and as we mentions do you back in December, 2010, The Prey app still holds a big win on protecting, scanning and finding your lost/stolen device.

Prey Anti-Theft is an application that attempts to remove the potential pain and heartbreak of losing your handset. Once installed, it waits for an activation SMS message - which you can select when you configure the app - and then kicks into action. The idea being that when you realize your phone is stolen of missing, you send an SMS containing the activation message to your phone number, and then Prey automatically uses the handset's GPS signal (or Wi-Fi) to relay its present location to the main Prey website.
From here you can also track your missing mobile, as well as

Android Deadly Trojan

IT security firm Kaspersky claims it has discovered the "most sophisticated" Android trojan yet.
Identified by Kaspersky as "Backdoor.AndroidOS.Obad.a," the mobile menace can send SMS to premium-rate numbers, download other malware and install them on the infected device, as well as send malware to other devices via Bluetooth, and remotely perform commands in the console.

Obad is also extremely well concealed, by means of code obfuscation, and it uses several previously undocumented security holes in the Android operating system to make it very hard to analyze.
Once the trojan is executed on a device, it immediately tries to

Gmail New App Update

Other features within the new Gmail for Android application include a new streamlined user interface with a swipe-down to refresh feature and sliding drawer with labels and account switcher to help mange multiple accounts.

Together with small images now shown alongside messages and improved readability, as well as the ability to empty trash. The latest Gmail for Android app is supported on devices running Google’s Android 4.0 operating system and higher.

This is what Google had to say :

If you'd like to try out the new inbox on your mobile device, click on the gear menu in Gmail on the desktop and select Configure inbox. The next time you use your mobile device, primary mail will be shown first and notifications will only appear for primary mail. It's easy to access and keep track of email in other categories by opening the menu.

These updates include some other new features. On Android, you'll get a new design with profile photos, a navigation menu, and more.  On the iPhone and iPad, you can choose to receive notifications for all messages, only important messages, or no messages at all, on a per account basis.

You can update or download the Android version here:  http://goo.gl/IEF7x
You can update or download for iPhone and iPad here: http://goo.gl/2ma4I

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Live Mario Wallpaper

If you got an android phone and you are a Mario lover, then this is the best wallpaper for you, it has Mario running threw your screen beating 3 stages (Super Mario 3) and it can be yours now. Mario Live Wallpaper is not there due to legal claim by Nintendo. Too bad, it is a great live wallpaper to have. Therefore, we have to download the Mario Live Wallpaper apk and install ourselves manually.

 

DOWNLOAD NOW!!!!!

Google Translate for Android Speech

Google has one of the best language translation technologies around, which they've continually improve it over the past few years. And now their Android app has the ability to support speech-to-speech translation in 14 languages. This means that Asian and Mexicans who don't know much English can now understand what the cops are saying when asking for a drivers license and registrations (No offense) My