Now-Patched Google Photos Vulnerability Let Hackers Track Your Friends and Location History

From imperva.com

A now-patched vulnerability in the web version of Google Photos allowed  malicious websites to expose where, when, and with whom your photos were taken.

Background

One trillion photos were taken in 2018. With image quality and file size increasing, it’s obvious why more and more people choose to host their photos on services like iCloud, Dropbox and Google Photos.

One of the best features of Google Photos is its search engine. Google Photos automatically tags all your photos using each picture’s metadata (geographic coordinates, date, etc.) and a state-of-the-art AI engine, capable of describing photos with text, and detecting objects and events such as weddings, waterfalls, sunsets and many others. If that’s not enough, facial recognition is also used to automatically tag people in photos. You could then use all this information in your search query just by writing “Photos of me and Tanya from Paris 2018”.

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