Air Force Warns Troops about Location-awareness Services on Social Networking SitesNovember 23, 2010
Letting people know your exact location at any given time is the latest craze for those using social networking sites like Facebook. But while that may seem harmless enough in the civilian world, it could be a matter of life and death for those in combat zones. The U.S. Air Force this week warned its troops about using Facebook and other popular networking sites because of the geo-location features that could show enemies exact locations and movements in war zones, according to an article in Bloomberg News. The Air Force posted a warning on its internal website and also asked senior commanders to alert their troops about the dangers. The warning noted that the "careless use of these services by airmen can have devastating operations security and privacy implications." Location services have exploded in popularity over the past year as more people use smart phones and regular phones with GPS or other ways for pinpointing a device's location. Sites like Facebook, Foursquare and Gowalla have tailored their features around geo-location and location-awareness technology to offer a variety of services, including publishing a user's exact location on a map. A popular Facebook book feature is the mobile photo upload, which could reveal locations because of the phone's geo-location technology or if someone used a camera that embeds geo-location information into the image itself. The location-awareness features can be turned off, but because Facebook, the largest of the social networking sites, continually changes its privacy policy and settings, it is often difficult to know what your current privacy status is. The U.S. military currently has 95,000 troops in Afghanistan and about 50,000 in Iraq. The Army, which has the largest number of soldiers in those countries, plans to issue a similar warning, according to Bloomberg. |
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