NEW YORK (PNN) - December 7, 2012 - John McAfee - anti-virus pioneer, "person of interest" in a Belize murder investigation, and launcher of increasingly bizarre media stories - has been captured. It happened after journalists from Vice accidentally published an iPhone photo of McAfee with embedded GPS data.
In case you didn't know, a lot of newer devices store that kind of information, known as EXIF data, in images. EXIF data is helpful in providing details about a photograph's provenance.
But in case you're traveling with a murder suspect, you might not want to share that information. So here's a handy guide to getting rid of it.
Switch off location settings.
Since the Vice photo was published from an iPhone, we'll start there. There's a camera "location services" setting that can be switched off, and, easy enough, you've got a GPS-free photo to share with the world.
Use editing software.
If you want to go through editing software, you have some other options, too. The "Save For Web" function (File, Save for Web & Devices) should scrub the data, but the scrubbing is probably the very last step you want to take before you release your photo, and there's usually a way to do it within your operating system.
Check your social networks.
For those of you who are especially worried about people tracking you down, Facebook and Twitter strip EXIF data and Flickr makes you opt in to using it (although not all third-party clients will do the same). So, be careful when sharing your anti-virus outlaw pics with friends!
