You know whatâs awful? Fearing that your food has been⌠defiled in some way. Which is why people were enraged in 2012 when a viral photo was posted to 4chan of an unseen employee standing atop two bins of the shredded lettuce speeding into your fast food. A strange mystery without hint of who might have done it or where, inspiring the looming dread of paranoia to fester within the backs of our minds⌠Until, you know, Burger King caught the people involved regardless and fired them. Wait, what? How did they find them!? You canât even tell if itâs a Burger King from looking at the image. The same way that some tech savvy individuals were led to wonder if these two pictures of Donald Trump were staged, given that they were taken only ten minutes apart. Despite how little information it seems they reveal, pictures say a thousand words⌠Youâre telling me that I could use a photo to track someone down? Yes! Meet John McAfeeâ That name sounds familiar. And it should, Howard, run a search! Querying⌠John McAfee... Result found. Entrepreneur, computer programmer, and creator of McAfee anti-virus. THAT guy makes anti-virus software!? Among other things, yes! He himself came face to face with the danger that stray photographs can pose when a photo was posted to the internet during his time in Central America. McAfeeâs Bizarre Adventure led him to move to Belize in 2008, where he was suspected of going all Breaking Bad, which led to a local police raid on his home. November, 2012, McAfee was listed as a person of interest by the Belize government after his neighbor was found dead in a pool of blood. Upon seeing the police approaching his compound in the jungle, he buried himself in the sand and covered his head with a cardboard box, and then he waited. For hours. McAfee believed that the suspicious death had been targeted at him but hit his neighbor by mistake. So he went on the run, fearing that if police managed to capture him, he would get the gulag treatment. He feared that the Belize government was trying to rid itself of him after he claimed to run criminal enterprises out of a local town, and refused to pay bribe money to a local politician. Ok, thatâs gotta be paranoia, right? Well, thatâs certainly what Belizeâs Prime Minister Dean Barrow stated, calling the claims, âutter and complete nonsense.â But paranoia or not, he seemingly vanished with only a photo as evidence to his continued survival. A photo that revealed that he had in fact vanished from Belize. Wait, wait, what? How did they get a location from a photo like that? I mean, I guess thereâs a tree, but, câmon! Oh! Was it like that time Shia LaBeouf put up a flag and then people tracked plane routes to figure out where it was and then they trolled him? Oh wait, donât tell me thatâs some kind of rare tree that only grows in one specific place! In fact if we enhance this picture I can take a look at the leaves, and see the reflection in McAfeeâs eyes and determine that⌠I have no idea where this is. No, no, nothing that obtuse. Our culprit lies within the camera itself. Like the camera spilled the beans? But how? Thatâs why I always say, never trust a camera! Theyâre all narcs. Itâs metadata. Thatâs exactly it, Howard. Hereâs the thing about cameras these days, theyâre smart. Unlike these two. At least I can walk. Tin can. Meatbag. Tin can. Meatbag. Tin can. Meatbag. Most digital cameras these days will write a certain amount of data to any photo they take. Now with DSLRs, itâs fairly standard to see information for shutter speed, aperture, and ISO settings. That is to say the lighting settings used by the camera. This data is also known as EXIF data, which is short for âEXchangeable Image File formatâ. Most photography focused social media sites like flickr and 500px will show this data, and you can also view this information in the properties of a photo file on your computer. But how can you find out where someone is with just that? Some cameras are just smarter than others, right Brew? Thatâs correct. Cameras like, say, the one in your smartphone! Phones today have advanced GPS systems that can track you down to an exact longitude and latitude. And that goes straight into your EXIF data when you take a photo with GPS tracking on. Is that what happened to that McAfee guy? You'd think someone who made antivirus would think of that. Well, he wasnât the one that posted the image. During his time on the run, McAfee was visited by Vice editor-in-chief Rocco Castoro and photographer Robert King who took a photo of Castoro posing with McAfee which was then posted in an article about the antivirus magnateâs time on the run, including a body double who had been arrested at the Mexican border with a Hermit Kingdom passport under McAfeeâs name. Which was apparently a ruse to obfuscate his actual location. Thatâs⌠out there. Internet sleuths looked into the image and found out that Vice kind of sort of forgot about the EXIF data. Ohhhh, and it like, told people about what kind of camera it was taken on? In addition to the device information and camera settings, the photo had details on where and when the photo was taken, down to the exact longitude and latitude he was at when they âsnapped the picâ as the kids say. I think everyone says that. Namely, in Guatemala, which is not Belize. At first, both McAfee and the photographer tried to claim that the location included in the EXIF data was a ruse meant to mislead those looking for McAfee. Which, itself was actually a ruse. The data was correct, and McAfee soon had to hire a lawyer because heâd, you know⌠Snuck across the border into Guatemala without his passport. I mean, câmon. So, how do you look at this EXIF data anyway? Itâs pretty easy. Generally you just download the photo, and view itâs properties to see details. So if someone sends you a photo from their phone of some amazing looking coffee, you can find out everything from what model of phone theyâre using, to which cafe theyâre at right now. If it has GPS coordinates, you can just plug those in and⌠Lifehack is in the Hillside dumpster. Huh. Lance is in the alley behind the Don McRonâs burger joint. Oh look, Spillâs at home. Charles is in the dumpster. I mean, we saw that right? This might be too much power. Well, many popular social media sites like Facebook, Imgur, Instagram, and Twitter prevent other users from accessing your data. Canât help but notice the emphasis on âusersâ there. Well, yes. In the words of Hany Farid, a professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley: âYou can almost certainly be assured they are not throwing it away, given that theyâre basically big data vacuum cleaners,â Which was confirmed by a Facebook spokesperson in an email to Consumer Reports. In the statement, Facebook said that they do collect, quote, âinformation like the make and model of the device used to take the photo, the camera settings, and the date the photo was taken⌠to make your experience better and to keep people safe.â Gee whiz, I feel safer already. Ok, but, thereâs gotta be a way to remove that EXIF stuff, right? Right you are. If youâre using a PC, thereâs a button at the bottom of the âdetailsâ page that shows you all the EXIF data that your picture contains that reads âRemove Properties and Personal Informationâ. Using that, you can either create a copy of the file with all information removed, or choose what data you want removed in particular. If youâre using a smartphone, thereâs a setting that lets you turn off the location data for pictures when you take them, and of course, there are plenty of apps out there for Mac, iOs, Android, and PC that will allow you to remove all the data you want from as many pictures as you want. So what happened to our subjects who had their locations leaked via photographs? Well, in the case of John McAfee⌠he was arrested in Guatemala, and then expelled to the US on a flight to Miami. He remained a person of interest in Belize and was later found liable for his neighborâs death in a lawsuit, though not in a criminal trial. He was later arrested in the Dominican Republic for possession of illegal firearms on his yacht in 2019. He ran for the United States Presidential election in 2020, though he later ended his campaign and instead asked to run as Vice President for Vermin Supreme. Most recently, he was arrested by the United States in 2020 for tax evasion. In the case of the Burger King lettuce boots, the culprits decided to upload their image to 4chan. A website that does not remove EXIF data, and whose denizens were⌠upset at the idea of someone standing in their burger components. The users used the geotagging data to determine exactly which Burger King the photos had been taken at, and went about informing the company and the local media. Yeah⌠the three employees got fired. No matter how comfortable we may have become with them, itâs important to remember that much of the technology we use on a daily basis will keep tabs on us, if allowed to. And if we want privacy, we have to keep an eye on what settings we use. Donât want to be tracked? Turn off your GPS, double check your photo settings, and maybe check out our video on cyber security and whether or not your devices are listening to you right now. After all, a picture can say a thousand words, but sometimes it just needs one â âFiredâ.
8 years later and people find his house, damn