North Mississippi Gem and Mineral Society

It's been a couple of years since we covered this subject, but it appears that it is time to bring it up again. We have many new members, so it's good to go over some important facts about our field trip sites. First of all, our organization works very hard to procure the permission of landowners in order to have places where we can do our field collecting. We do collect on some sites that are considered "public" like road cuts or the Frankstown site for instance, but many of our trips are on private property. Every time NMGMS schedules a field trip on private property, our field trip chair calls and inquires, if the landowner will grant us permission to access the property and fossil collect on it. We have been very fortunate to remain in good standing with these landowners and as such, we respect their rights as property owners. With liability issues a big factor these days, this is a real plus for us. We are covered by our SFMS insurance when we go out in the field on a certified NMGMS field trip. Permission granted to the club does not mean that individual members or the general public has permission to go on the property on their own. (The crab site is probably the only exception to this because, it appears that the whole world goes there and the owner has been very gracious in allowing this to take place. I still email him to let him know when NMGMS has a scheduled field trip out there.)

This brings me to another point that I would like to make, and that is to please not make references to exact names or locations of these field trip sites when posting photos or other notes on the Internet.

Food for Thought about Geotagging…. By Nancy Roberts

Here’s some information that I gleaned from Wikipedia: “In order to capture GPS data at the time the photograph is captured, the user must have a camera with built in GPS. Most smart phones already use a GPS chip along with built-in cameras to allow users to automatically geotag photos. Others may have the GPS chip and camera but do not have internal software needed to embed the GPS information within the picture. With photos stored in JPEG file format, the geotag information is typically embedded in the metadata (stored in Exchangeable image file format (EXIF) or Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) format). These data are not visible in the picture itself but are read and written by special programs and most digital cameras and modern scanners. Latitude and longitude are stored in units of degrees with decimals and this geotag information can be read by many programs, such as the cross-platform open source ExifTool.”

So what does all of this mean? It means that you could be telling people a lot more than just what you meant to, when you posted a picture online. Data attached to your photos allows someone to determine, with great accuracy, the whereabouts of your home, your place of work or school and where you have been. Being unaware of this feature on your smartphone and posting personal photos online poses the potential for security risks. These dangers can be avoided by removing geotags with a metadata removal tool for photos before publishing them on the Internet, or better yet, turning off the geotagging feature on your smartphone all together! Thankfully, turning off your smartphone’s geotagging feature is fairly simple. You should be able to go into your settings and then into location services, which may be under “general”. If you turn all location services off, then that will turn off your maps too, so you can just go down to “camera” and turn that off. Then, all future photos taken will not have the geotag data on them. Because each smartphone is different however, check out your phone’s manufacturer’s website to get exact instructions on how to do this. So, be informed, be safe and as always, use discretion whenever posting anything onto a social media site on the Internet. For more information on the topic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geotagging http://www.icanstalku.com/how.php

http://www.thoughtshots.com/2010/07/how-to-turn-off-geotagging-on-your-photos/

http://voices.yahoo.com/how-disable-geotagging-iphone-android-phone-7656690.html

North Mississippi

Gem and Mineral

Society, Inc