Here’s a Clever Conspiracy Theory

It seems like we have enough issues to worry about in America, that we don’t need to contrive concerns that the supposed adoption of medical codes originally created by the World Health Organization is somehow a threat to American sovereignty. (WARNING: Don’t click that link if you don’t want a huge heaping helping of paranoia and dumb.)

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Five Things Parents Might Want to Be More Extremely Afraid Of Than Exif Data

msthurnell from morguefile.com

Creepiest picture I could find on short notice (Via morguefile.com)

Crime committed against children is never a laughing matter. It is something we should take all reasonable measures to prevent, investigate, and punish. That said, the paranoia stoked in parents by the media, particularly local news on slow news days, is occasionally hilarious. To me, anyway.

(Now is usually a good time to reiterate that I don’t have kids.)

A warning has been making the social media rounds over the past few days about the risk posed when a parent posts a smartphone picture of their child to the internet. Yes, pictures taken on your smartphone may have Exchangeable image file format (Exif) data that indicates the GPS position where the picture was taken, and yes, it is hypothetically possible that a person could access that data in order to locate your child. A good deconstruction of this paranoia appears on the website Daddy Doctrines (h/t Jennifer):

Here’s the fact you need to always keep in mind when these things come around: the chances of your child being abducted by a family member or someone close to the family is exponentially higher than the chances that some shadowy internet stalker somewhere is going to track down your child.

And if they did? If Shadowy Stalker did see a photo of my kid, and use his techno-powers to pull out the Exif data and determine my home address? How is that more of a threat than all the decades where one need only look in the phone book?

*** Continue reading

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