Memory cards are now 500,000 times cheaper than they were in 1990, the price per megabyte having dropped from $1,000 to 2 cents. But the cards are increasingly valuable to marketers and data miners. They're able to tease secret information from your cards, including your income level, shopping patterns, camera and lens ownership, your vacation destinations, and much more!
Are you (and your identity) at risk? Can you prevent unwanted snooping?
The fact is, memory cards can store much more than picture files -- and picture files contain much more information than just pixels. Each card has a permanent, embedded serial number, so theoretically that number could be paired with your ID and any information mined from the card.
According to Lucidiom, Inc., one of the largest manufacturers of photo kiosk software, that information can be of value to its customers in a number of ways. Its APM ProfitWatcher service collects and analyzes information from memory cards, including:
1 The products you're ordering (print sizes, quantity, specialty items).
2 The size and brand of your memory card.
3 The card's usage history -- the type of image files (TIFF, JPEG, RAW)
stored and how many pictures you've taken, saved, and erased.
4 What products you've ordered, sorted by camera type and session.
5 What photo failures require fixing, such as redeye, color, and under- and overexposure.
6 The camera brand and model you use.
That's just some of the information Lucidiom continually adds to its database and turns into data that can help its kiosk owners track and increase their sales. For example, a store could promote deals on higher-capacity memory cards if ProfitWatcher reveals that many of its customers shoot with 6-10MP DSLRs but own only 128MB cards.
Other information that can be found in a JPEG EXIF header could help a kiosk owner establish the number and quality of lenses you own, plus the type of photography you like. However, the kiosk owner is the one who decides whether or not a customer is required to input his or her name and address during a transaction at a kiosk.
The information Lucidiom gathers might be more than you want to give away for free, but at least it's secure. According to Steve Giordano, Sr., chairman and CEO, "At the heart of our APM Network is Lucidiom's central processing servers, hosted at a secure, fault-tolerant, co-location facility. Retailers can access their own kiosk data but not that of any other retailer."
Spokespeople at Fujifilm and Kodak told me that the information they take from a memory card is used only to improve the image quality of the prints or services offered, and not gathered on the Lucidiom scale.
But what if you use a kiosk that's run by a shady organization? Identity theft is a distinct danger with nonbank ATMs, and internet hackers break into databases and uplinks all the time. Could they also steal copies of the images you're having printed or uploaded to a website?
Not if you take these steps: First, never store personal documents or other valuable information on a memory card you plan to use in a kiosk. Second, don't use a built-in credit card reader if you aren't confident about the security of the kiosk and its location. Third, don't volunteer personal information even if requested by the kiosk. As a foolproof resort, print all your photos at home.
Am I on the payroll of the inkjet printer manufacturers? Or am I merely paranoid? Neither. Right now, data mining from memory cards is in the earliest stages. In the future it could evolve to include face recognition, GPS data, and information-sharing with databases from cell phone carriers and other partners.
I wouldn't be surprised if someday a message popped up on the print kiosk I was using -- or worse, a text message on my cell phone: "Hey, dude! That photo (img0045) of your sister Kathleen doing the chicken dance at Tim's wedding would make a great birthday card for Mom. Why not send it to her now for only $1.25!"
Is this scenario too far out? I hope so -- and so does my sister!
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