Silk Road forums

Discussion => Security => Topic started by: thecrackhead on December 07, 2012, 06:32 pm

Title: Removing personal info from Photos!
Post by: thecrackhead on December 07, 2012, 06:32 pm
I've decided to create this topic due to an earlier incident that occurred when a vendor compromised his location completely by uploading a photo.
I will not tell you which vendor as the situation has been sorted thanks to Guru. Note that the vendor was active on both SR and the forum for almost a year.

He risked everything on a fucking photo.

When you take a picture with your digital camera, it stores all sorts of information, called EXIF (Exchangable Image File) data, in the photo's file. This includes things like type of camera, shutter speed, or the date the photo was taken. However, many new cameras—especially the cameras built into iPhone and Android phones—will also store your GPS location by default, which could easily lead someone to your home address or phone number.

Yes I know that some of you know this but trust me, after today's incident I realized that if a LE would have copied the photo and look into the metadata, the vendor's house would have been raided within the next two hours (I know why).

Here is how to get rid of that info on the photos you upload on SR and in general on Dark Net for Windows, MAC OS X and Linux:

Windows
Windows has the ability to remove this information built in, which is really handy. All you need to do is select a photo or group of photos in Windows Explorer, right-click on them, and hit Properties. Under the Details tab, you'll find a link (near the bottom of the window) that says "Remove Properties and Personal Information". Click that, and hit OK in the window that comes up. You'll notice that you'll have a copy of each photo in that same folder. The copied photos will be the one with clean data, which are safe to share with your friends on Twitter, Facebook, or other places on the web.

MAC OS X
Mac users will have to download some extra software to get the job done. The easiest tool is an app called SmallImage. Click here to go to the project's home page and download the file (Snow Leopard users should note the red text at the bottom of the page; you'll need a newer version of the app).

Open up the app and drag the photos you want to clean into its window. Uncheck the "Recompress at quality" box, since we want to keep the photos high quality. Then, just hit "Process" and you'll see copies of all the photos show up in their folder. If you want to replace the original photos instead of creating copies, you can just uncheck the "Add Suffix" box (as shown in the above photo), and it will just replace the original photos with clean ones.

Linux
Linux users can use a tool called EXIFTool (which is available for Windows and OS X too, but is a command line tool, so we opted for the easier alternatives above). You can install it on Ubuntu by running the command:
sudo apt-get install libimage-exiftool-perl

Then, to clean your photos, just cd to the their folder and run:
exiftool -all= *.jpg
It will make copies of all your photos for you, adding _original to the end of the original photos (with the personal information still intact).

There are a lot of other programs out there, but these are some of the easeist ways to delete any personal information that may be lingering in your photos. Keep in mind you'll still need to do manual photo editing if your address or phone number is in the shot itself—this only removes data from the file on your computer, not the visible picture.

NOTE:
This is very, very serious. If you decide not to do it or if you can't be bothered to do it you'd better turn yourself in as your chances of getting raided are fucking huge!

Thank you!

Will update a bit later with photos but now I have to go.
Title: Re: Removing personal info from Photos!
Post by: Ballzinator on December 07, 2012, 07:08 pm
A really easy way to remove the EXIF data is to upload the image to imgur.com, resave it to you computer and then upload it to onionimages after. Then delete the imgur images through the link they give you, delete the images off your laptop and do a drive wipe.
imgur reduces the quality of the image. I use JPEG & PNG Stripper when I'm on Windows:
http://www.steelbytes.com/?mid=30
Title: Re: Removing personal info from Photos!
Post by: SRtester on December 08, 2012, 12:44 am
Great idea for an info thread, as this too often goes overlooked, lives get ruined, anyone who browses 4chan /b/ should know this. On a lighter note, for once Windows offers the easiest solution to a problem (vs. Mac/Linux)  :)