If this tutorial saves a single person from having something bad happen then it was worth writing
There are 2 ways to make sure this doesn't happen:
1. Disable GPScamera features on smart phones so that the GPS data is not attached to the photo in the first place.
2. Modify your photobucket account to strip the GPS location when an image is uploaded
Method 1: Disable gps camera features on smart phones
Smart phone instructions courtesy of http://icanstalku.com/how.php
iPhone (iOS 4.x)
Apple greatly simplified the way to turn off location services on a per-application basis. To see your settings, go to Settings, General, then Location Services. From there you can set which applications can access your GPS coordinates or disable it entirely.
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iPhone (iOS 3.x)
With the iOS 3.x there are two ways to disable Geotagging of photos. The first involves disabling of all location based services. To disable this feature, Go to Settings, General then set Location Services to off.
Be warned: This will turn off ALL location based services for ALL applications. Of course we may actually have need to use location based services for other applications (such as maps and driving directions, or getting robbed via Foursquare), but just not for our pictures.
There is no easy way to disable location based services for just one application. However, we can make the iPhone prompt us at first use for each application. Once reset, the first time we enter the application we can enable or disable location based services for the application. To do so we need to go to Settings, General, Reset.
Be careful here! We want to select Reset Location Warnings, and then Reset Warnings. This restores all of our Location based warnings for each application to the default, which in most cases is "Ask on first use".
From here, once we enter into the default Camera app on the iPhone, we can select Don't Allow. This will prevent the Camera app from geotagging our photos.
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Palm WebOS
Palm has made it fairly easy to disable applications from accessing the GPS without your explicit permission. If you bring up the "Location Services" configuration screen, there should be three options: Auto Locate, Geotag Photos, and Background Data Collection. Ideally, all three should be turned off.
To disable geotagging photos, simply turn the "Geotag Photos" option off. If "Auto Locate" is off, the "Geotag Photos" option will not be displayed as the Pre will not geotag photos with "Auto Locate" off. Once the "Geotag Photos" is turned off, the camera application will no longer geo tag photos. As a side note, if "Auto Locate" is off, the Pre will prompt you anytime an application requests your location from the GPS. This allows you to know who's asking to find out where you are.
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Google Android (Verizon Droid Phones, this is you!
) Like the iPhone, there are two ways to turn off geotagging. To completely disable GPS location finding for all applications, we will need to do the following:
Press the Menu Key and then Settings
Then press Location and security
By default, GPS is on. Uncheck it to turn it off
Like disabling the GPS in the iPhone, this will break location based information for all applications, including legitimate uses.
In order to disable for just the camera application, start the Camera app to make sure that you are not saving your location. This is the menu on the left side of the camera application; it slides out from left to right.
Select "Store Location" and make sure it is set to off.
Once this is disabled, the camera app will no longer add geotags to your images.
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BlackBerry Devices
There are multiple ways to disable the geo-tags on Blackberry. We details three ways here:
(Via Bug_Bear)
Select Options, Advanced Options, GPS, press Menu key, Select Disable GPS and select Yes to confirm. This will disable all GPS capabilities on the phone.
(Via Bug_Bear)
Select Options, Security, Applications Permissions, menu select Edit on the application (default is Prompt for BB Core), Expand Connections, Change Location (GPS) to "Deny", or you can disable within the application. Most apps i.e. Google Maps, Ubertwitter, etc... will just default everything to "allow" for app perms regardless of app settings chosen during setup.
(Via an anonymous contributor... Thanks!)
Go into picture-taking mode (via HomeScreen, click icon "Camera"), press the Menu button and choose "Options". Set the "Geotagging" setting to be "Disabled". Finally, save the updated settings.
Method 2: Modify your photobucket account to strip the GPS location
Login to photobucket, click your user name (1) and select your account settings (2)
Select the privacy tab (1), activate remove information checkbox (2) and then click save (3)
Your photos will now be stripped of location information when they are uploaded.
Please note: You may need to re-upload images that you previously uploaded to your account with the location information as I don’t believe checking this option erases data from existing images within your account.
