A free site to help find your lost, stolen cameras
A clever experiment may make it possible for you to recover a stolen camera, find people using your photos without permission and help police catch child pornographers.
The experiment is a collaboration between GadgetTrak, a software company that makes data-protection and tracking software for computers and phones, and CPUsage, a company that gets home computers to collaborate on crunching data when they aren’t in use (similar to SETI at home).
The collaboration, called GadgetTrak Serial Search, works by searching the Web for information that is commonly embedded in today’s photographs. Digital cameras often stamp photos with the camera’s serial number, as well as information on exposure, shutter speed, time and date taken and in some cases, where it was taken.
The free service uses the computing power of its collaborative network to search the Web for photos and then catalogs the images and associated cameras it finds. You can go to the Web site, enter a camera’s serial number and see if your photos register. It has logged more than 3 million serial numbers in a little over a week.
If you see photos you didn’t take, you’ll have a clue to who has your camera. If you see your photos on site that you haven’t given permission to use them, you may be able to go after them for copyright infringement. And of course, homemade pornography can more easily be traced back to the person taking the photos.
For photos to show up, they not only have to have embedded data, but also must be posted somewhere like Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, or any public site.
It is possible for thieves to thwart the system by altering a camera’s serial number stamp, "but it’s not something the average user can do," said Ken Westin founder of ActiveTrak, which makes GadgetTrak software.
Source: MB
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