Tip of the Week: How To Keep Twitter From Telling The World Where You Live

You may have noticed how social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter often share the location of any pictures you post, if they are set up to do so. Well, you’ve probably asked yourself if your device will share this information automatically, or if you have to enable this setting yourself.

If you have your device’s location settings enabled, Twitter will simply use any embedded coordinates to suggest potential locations for your picture. Thankfully, Twitter claims that it doesn’t store the EXIF data, which is embedded data found in your device’s camera. The EXIF data also often comes with GPS coordinates. Therefore, it doesn’t know exactly where the picture was taken or when, while still providing users with an opportunity to share the location on a whim.

Furthermore, the EXIF data of your tweet isn’t going to be available to just anyone on the Internet who sees your tweet, so you can rest easy knowing that your tweet isn’t going to give away any information that you wouldn’t otherwise share with your followers. You can pinpoint on a little map where your picture was taken when you share your tweet, however, which lets you voluntarily share where your picture was taken. Since Twitter will automatically strip out the EXIF data if you don’t want it there, you have to choose to share it if you want to.

But what if you want to remove any location sharing on your previous posts or tweets? This is possible as well--all you have to do is log into your Twitter account and go to your Privacy & Safety settings. Look for the option that says Tweet Location and select Delete Location Information. Once you’ve done this, just click on Save Changes and you should be all set.

While Twitter makes it easy not to leak too much personal information with your tweets, you should always be wary of just how much you share on your social media platforms--especially if you have a rather large online audience. You never know who could be looking at your posts, trying to get as much information about you as possible.

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