Before you send a sext, consider whether you want to include identifying details like your face, tattoos, piercings, birthmarks, decorations (like posters), and furniture. It’s more secure to leave these details out of the photo in the first place, rather than blur them later. It’s not impossible to recreate blurred portions of images.
“Making sure that one’s face is obscured, or that identifying features like tattoos, piercings, clothing, and even home furnishings are out of the frame is important because if they are covered or out of frame, they can’t be used to identify you if the image is made public,” Irwin told me.
If you use iCloud Photo Library or Google Photos, your images and videos are automatically being synced to a library in the cloud, meaning they don’t just live on your device. Under normal circumstances, syncing can be a convenience, like if you lose your phone for instance.
The feature is in part what allowed hackers to steal hundreds of nude celebrity images during the 2014 iCloud hack.
It’s also worth noting that if you have a passcode on your iPhone, the contents of your phone are encrypted and thus difficult to access without the passcode. But iCloud itself can be accessed by Apple because the company retains encryption keys for the service.
By looking at the EXIF data, a sexting partner can potentially know exactly where you’re located
“Unless you use a strong, unique password and have set up two-factor authentication wherever possible, avoid using cloud-based apps that allow you to log in with a username and password from any device,” Irwin told me.
Here’s how to turn syncing off. On an iPhone, go to Settings > Photos > iCloud Photo Library. There, toggle the feature off. On Google Photos, go to Settings > Accounts > Accounts & Sync http://www.hookupdate.net/escort-index/jacksonville. Then uncheck the account you want to unsync.
Every time you snap a photo on your smartphone, something called EXIF data is embedded into the image file. Some of the information encoded is fairly benign, like what kind of camera you used.
But EXIF data also includes the precise location a photo was taken, which is potentially dangerous if you’re sexting with someone you don’t know well, or if you’re uploading explicit photos to a public website
“People should be very aware of EXIF data, which stands for Exchangeable Image File. This is a sort of data that is often stored on JPEG, RAW, and TIFF image files. It includes geolocation (if enabled), precise date/time photo was taken, and a host of technical information,” Joseph Jerome, a lawyer working on the Privacy & Data Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology told me in an email.
Thankfully, it’s fairly easy to remove this information from an image before you share it. On an iPhone, you will need a third-party app to complete the process, such as ViewExif. The app is an iOS extension, so you can use it without needing to leave the Photos app. It lets you strip the metadata from an image, and save the new clean version right to your Photos app. That way, a sexting partner will be unable to know where you are.
If you are uploading nude photos to a third-party image hosting site, some-but not all-automatically strip EXIF data, but it’s best if you do this yourself.
Deciding which app is right for your threat model is a crucially important part of practicing safe sexting. Make sure you choose an application that you don’t normally use to communicate with friends and family. “To avoid accidental breaches of privacy, the most important thing that people can do to protect themselves is to limit photo or intimate video sharing to its own app,” Irwin told me.