Privacy
 

A little bit on privacy
I was stunned the other day to find my digital camera had my name in it and each and every photo had my name and my camera details in it's file .

There is a free program called WinHex available from http://www.x-ways.net/ This is a Windows only at the moment so if someone finds a Linux version please post back

which is interesting when having a look at all files and this one easily moves around the FAT tables etc.

Grab the program , open a jpeg file and have a look

Additionally I use Open Office now because it is free ,is transparent ,uses only a fraction of the space and doesn't put your name in each file like Microsoft office does. Will read and save in Microsoft Office format if you wish.

So whats going on with the .jpeg and .doc files? Who is writing this software that snoops and more importantly why?

Wherever your document or photo files appear ,in court , police, govt offices your name is all over them , careful now, don't ring on your mobile phone theve got all that too !
__________________
One picture is worth a thousand words
One visit is worth a thousand pictures

You want to hear something interesting about privacy? Go look up ECHELON or COINTELPRO. That might scare you even more than your name being attached to your digital photos.

--jrtayloriv

Don't be paranoid, that data is know as EXIF and a lot of us find it quite useful!

For instance, you can see what parameters you used for a certain picture, or what parameters that good photographer used. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

But, if you like your tinfoil hat, you can easily write a little code to strip all exif out of your pictures (I presume such thing already exists).

About tags: I guess you can change your name in settings of your camera. To 'XXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXX', for example. Treacherous Computing (official name: Trusted Computing; trusted, in security and privacy: something that can break your security and/or privacy) is far more dangerous.

About hex editing: you can edit files with vim binary mode (vim -b, as I remember, ':help xxd' will say). Or you can get accustomed to hexdump - before and after editing, in opposite directions. To edit partitions, learn using dd on /dev/{hd*,sd*} . In KDE there is KHexEdit which provides all basic functionality for file editing also.

I can't find any *good* reason why would anybody put his/her name into a camera... You don't have to put all data into it...

I can find one. If you carry camera a lot and mostly in a place with honest people (especially when everybody knows no less than a half of others), and leave it somewhere in that building, it will return quicker if your real name is in it. Not that such a situation is very probable...

The point is ,I didn't put my name in the camera !, Windows did without me knowing .

About a year back a uni proffessor found that Windows Office files contained details of your computer and connection hidden in the data and Microsoft was taken to court and agreed to stop doing this .
Little chance

By the way get a Hex editor and have a look before you post.
This is not EXIF I am talking about
This info is in the first 512 bits of data on each pictures
This is from Kate display of an image file on a second camera I have-dont copy the binary!dont know what it does
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So you see your name, Mr. Olympus...

C'mon, where do you see your name?!

Raskin: I agree with that... But AFAIK, there's no EXIF related to the name of the owner (yeah, I've checked the specs).

Well, it's an interesting question if there is anything revealing your name in an image. JPEG contains comments, after all..
About putting your name in camera - they get so much smarter, maybe it can hold owner name not for putting to an image, just for device identification.

Jesus some of you blokes are slow- The below is from a Canon whch I attached to a Windows computer once and I have never put my name into the camera . Mr kotnic-I have three cameras and as I said above that post was from a SECOND camera I have .Have a bloody think before you post


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EXIF data ...
 

... can be viewed at least with GQView and Gwenview. However: Are your files with the name directly from the camera or did you use some archiving program on Windows? I don't remember Windows adding anything to my jpeg's (but then it was Win 98). As said before, the EXIF data is very usefull when containing relevant information (most important: camera modell and data about camera settings like white balance, shutter speed etc.).

Doc files carry the name of the "Author" (by default the name of Windows user, I think, you can even view this in Word, if I remember correctly).

@kotnik: Older GIMP versions destroyed EXIF data when saving jpeg's, as they couldn't handle it. Most serious image hobbiest didn't appreciate at all ...

BTW the above first data of a jpeg file was out of the Olympus camera straight to a Linux machine and extracted with Kate editor

The second camera data was the same way. However back some time ago I attached it to a Windows computer and my name can only have come from the camera seeking out the info from Windows I suppose . I dont download images to the Windows computer normally.
So I am assuming this must be written into the camera firmware.

Hans you posted at the same time
Doc files some years ago were found to contain data related to the motherboard identification and other material from the computer used . In a court case in the states Microsoft was fined and made to alter the program in future releases. I notice I cant google the stuff now but this site is I think where you can remove it from old licenced versions of Office

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en

all of which spells "D-U-M-P W-I-N-D-O-W-S N-O-W!!!" Vista is probably going to send a brain sample to the NSA, if Billy Borg has his way...

[Sorry for OT, but I couldn't resist it]

catworld: Actually it will. NSA is doing Vista's security:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...010801352.html