Capturing Wildlife: How Poachers Are Liking and Using Your Photos

• by Jessica Ramos
  
  
  When it comes to social media, sharing can be a lot of fun. Who doesn’t like making friends, family and followers hungry with mouthwatering #foodporn pictures?
  Capturing and sharing images or videos of your encounters with wildlife can also be a lot of fun, but it turns out that it can also disrupt the natural order of the circle of life. Poachers can secretly be liking and using your content. Your content (and its possible built-in geotagging feature) could help poachers track down, hunt and kill some of the world’s most endangered animals.
  What‘s Geotagging?
  Geotagging adds geographical metadata to a piece of content in real-time. Geotags can be applied to your photos, videos, text messages, websites, RSS feeds and websites; they most commonly indicate latitude and longitude coordinates. Yet, they can also note the altitude, distance, accuracy and the name of a location.
  Poaching and Profit Gets Digital
  Geotagging makes cyberpoaching quick, easy and efficient.
  If you want to understand the risks that geotagging poses to wildlife, then here is how one park put it:
  
  Please be careful when sharing photos on social media. They can lead poachers to our rhino. Turn off geotag function and do not disclose where the photo was taken.
  Emails aren’t even safe. In India, there was a potential scare when a user was trying to access a conservationist’s email account. While this possible hacker was unsuccessful, they could’ve been privy to sensitive radio tracking collar information about the animals’ real-time location and movements.
  According to National Geographic, there is big money in the wildlife-trafficking industry. The industry hauls in profits of $7.8 to $10 billion per year.
  The cybersphere also makes it easier to buy a dead wildlife animal or the parts of a wild animal; it’s more anonymous, the transactions are quicker, and it’s harder to track. Websites dedicated to the trafficking of majestic animals do exist. Apparently, the animal’s blood on an object is a strong selling point...Read more: http://www.care2.com/causes/capturing-wildlife-how-poachers-are-liking-and-using-your-photos.html#ixzz31byCsXrq