Mark Edward Brown's Blog

For today’s Soldiers the dangers of battle are everywhere.  No longer do dangers lurk in faraway places or in foreign lands.  From the bright eyed, new recruit to the seasoned leader the hazards could be in the palm of their hand or even in their pocket.

Recently the Army has warned it’s troops to turn off the geo tag feature and other gps “tagging” types of technology that could cause a potential risk regarding giving away ones location on a military base or in a deployed environment overseas.

“There are a number of location-based social media applications and platforms, including Foursquare, Gowalla, SCVNGR, Shopkick, Loopt and Whrrl, currently on the market. They use GPS features, typically in the user’s phone, to publish the person’s location and offer rewards in the form of discounts, badges or points to encourage frequent check-ins.”

Geo-tagging risks extend to family members as well.  If you are the spouse or child of a military member and have a smartphone with the geo-tagging feature enabled you run the risk of revealing where your home is, where your child’s school is and many other aspects of information that you may wish to remain unknown to the general public.

In addition to the applications mentioned above Facebook is in the process of rolling out Timeline, a new layout that includes a map tab of all the locations a user has tagged.

Facebook can be dangerous because some people have hundreds of friends that they may never have actually met in person.  The dangers in this situation are that if a suspicious person views someone’s map tab on Facebook, they can see everywhere that person has tagged a location. You can see the restaurants they frequent, the gym they go to everyday, even the street they live on if they’re tagging photos of their home.

Keep in mind that cell and smartphones are not all bad.  They allow a level of convenience and efficiency that have not previously existed in our lives.  The major drawback that I dislike about them is that they can be tracked or traced to reveal your location even when you phone is turned off!  Thats a subject of a different variety and I’ll leave that for another time.

I am curious to know if you use the “Geo-Tagging” feature of your phone or if you consider features like this dangerous?  Leave me a comment and let me know, also share this article with others to raise their awareness of this situation.

Always with my best regards,

Mark Edward Brown