Articles

You obviously need geolocation in navigation services. It’s almost impossible to use Google Maps or other maps effectively if the system can’t recognise where you are. It won’t be able to provide you with a route. A taxi service will not be able to call a car to your address. 

Where can geolocation be temporary? For example, in Telegram. Sometimes you can send your location to a friend to meet up. But there are a huge number of services that don’t need to know where you are physically located at all. For example, news services, shops. Because there you still specify the delivery address when you buy something. So why does an online store need to know where you are? If you don’t understand why the app needs your location, don’t provide it if possible.

I want to tell you a short story. A video was published on one of the Russian Telegram channels about the alleged shooting of a Ukrainian woman with children by Ukrainian soldiers because she was speaking Russian. The fact is that as soon as this video was published, local users quickly analysed where the video was made. It turned out that this place is very recognisable by the tree crowns. And it was on territory not controlled by Ukraine. And it was a staged video. The location was precisely defined, and not the one stated in the publication. 

Therefore, there are certain markers that may not be obvious to you, but will be obvious to those who have it on their fingerprints. When you take pictures of air defence, you think you are photographing the sky with a missile flying and houses, and it doesn’t mean anything to anyone. But there are people who are experts in comparing publicly available photographs, maps, satellite images and understanding where the missile is being launched from. And this is, in fact, an identifier of where the launcher is located, which is a very interesting target for Russian ballistic missiles.

You’ve probably heard stories of Russians attacking, for example, restaurants and the like. We can only suspect how they came to the conclusion that this is a target worthy of attack. But we can assume two things: first, people who go to cafes can take selfies, photos, and post them on the Internet. If they publish these photos unchanged, for example, not just on social media, but send them to each other, then there is this metadata that will very clearly indicate where people are at the moment of taking the photo. Therefore, if you are involved in the military context, if you are going to a training, please don’t take photos with geodata, and even more so, if you have taken such photos, don’t share them unchanged. Because information may leak, and this photo with geodata will fall into the hands of the enemy, who will not even need to investigate. He will simply open the navigation in the maps and find the location.

But, in addition to geodata, there is another factor that can help determine what this photo indicates. These are photo analysis methods. These methods are used by the OSINT (OSINT is a service of a data processing system based on open information). Pay attention to text markers that can appear in the photo. There was a comical story about Prince Harry, who, while serving in the British armed forces, posted a photo on social media, where behind him on a white sheet was the login and password for some internal military system. This fell into the hands of all the investigators.

There are less obvious stories. For example, the story of STRAVA, a fitness app that analyses the activity of runners. Once they published a heat map of traffic along their most popular routes. As it turned out, in places where no one lived, powerful heat maps suddenly appeared, showing that people walked from 8 to 9 am in one direction and from 5 to 6 pm in another. This was analysed and it was found that these were American military bases. And this is an incredible danger, because both the location and the routine of life at these bases were published. No one did anything criminal, but the aggregated data from fitness trackers made this information public. Therefore, certain things may not be obvious to you.

If you are working in a military context or in another context that could be potentially dangerous for you if this data falls into the hands of the enemy, then remove the geo-data and try to anonymise the environment. Shoot indoors, and if you are shooting outdoors, keep in mind that it may be obvious where you’re taking the footage.

Indeed, the people who are now facing such attacks there have not yet developed a culture of dealing with the publication of information. They immediately film and publish it. This way, at the very least, they inform our information environment that the attack was successful. And they discredit the Russian official media, which constantly claim that all the missiles were shot down. Literally 15 minutes later, we see a video from eyewitnesses. This is discrediting their spokespeople, their official communications office, and it works in our favour. I am very grateful to all the people from the Russian side or from the temporarily occupied territories who provide us with this information.