5 Ways the Modern World Makes You Extremely Easy to Stalk

5 Any Photo You Post Online Gives Away Your Location

When we say that any picture you post online can let a stranger know where to find you, we're not talking about a photo of you standing in front of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, pretending to hold it up. We're talking about the photo you took of yourself, in your own bedroom, standing in front of your wall of One Direction posters.

So for instance, let's say you've given up on meeting Prince or Princess Charming in the real world and you've turned to dating sites. But you know there are some bona fide crazies out there, so you'll want to play it safe. For your profile pictures, you're sure to only use photos without recognizable background features or tell-tale scars proving you're the Chosen One or a Cuban drug lord, because then anyone could find you. You don't post your real name and you keep all your personal information behind a privacy wall, which is like a chastity belt for your identity, if your identity were a vagina.

Little do you know that the innocent self-portrait of you in your favorite George-Washington-but-as-a-cat costume has led Glenn Close (or her male equivalent, also named Glenn Close) right to your door. That's because every digital photo has a wide variety of information stored in the actual code of the file: Time, date, camera type, camera setting and how drunk you were when you took it are all embedded in the file when you upload the picture. You know what else is in that file? If you used your smartphone, the GPS coordinates of where you took the picture. You might as well arm your stalkers with some roofies while you're at it.

Don't believe us? In the summer of 2012, a couple of Burger King workers thought it would be hilarious to show just how much they loved serving customers fresh salad.

And they had to have felt completely safe posting that health code violation -- every fast food kitchen in the country probably has that same tiled floor, and there are probably 30 million fast food workers wearing black pants and tennis shoes. It could be anybody.

Yet it only took 4chan users 15 minutes to use the code embedded in the photos to figure out where the picture was taken and get the perpetrators' asses fired. Fifteen minutes. Imagine how fast a crazy person with a boner would work. Or literally anyone else with bad intentions.

The good news is that the major dating sites like Match.com and PlentyofFish.com are savvy enough to remove the GPS information when you upload your pictures. The bad news is that a quarter of the websites surveyed didn't, so beware, readers who use InterracialMatch.com or SeniorsCircle.com or SugarDaddyForMe.com. Not only are you setting yourself up for a lifetime of bluffing to your kids about how their parents met, but you also could be facilitating your own murder.

4 Your Copy Machine Is Storing Every Document You Copy

There are only two upsides to working in an office: mugging for the camera that's filming a nine-year-long documentary of your workspace, and free copies. Need a copy of your phone bill before you can move into your new apartment? Your Social Security card so you can falsely apply for unemployment? Are you a 1960s-era secretary who still thinks it's appropriate to make copies of your butt during a drunken Christmas party? We've all been there, and unless somebody has access to the copy or the original, nobody will ever know you did it.

Well, unless the copier was purchased after 2002.

Since then, most copiers have also functioned as scanners, fax machines and printers, which means they've all come with a hard drive. And that hard drive stores every single document ever recorded on it -- ever. Pull out the hard drive and download free software to scan it, and you'll have access to everything copied, scanned, faxed or emailed on that machine.

So let's say you buy yourself used copiers from a warehouse, as CBS investigators did in 2010. From those machines, investigators found everything from official sex crime complaints to pay stubs to 300 pages of private medical records. The whole operation was over in a few hours.

So, if you're an identity thief or a fake faith healer looking for someone to scam, you might want to invest in some used copiers. If you're a person who happens to have a creepy, overly attentive co-worker, know that unless you immediately overwrite everything you copy, or you hire a technician to destroy the hard drive, it's feasible for the creep in the mailroom to use his overtime to get acquainted with copies of your glass-flattened ass.

3 Your Facebook Profile Makes It Easy to Guess Your Password Security Questions

You're probably pretty careful with your passwords -- you're not like those novices who use "Password1234" for everything. You've got a nice combination of nonsense letters and special characters, and it'd take a supercomputer several thousand years to guess it.

Of course, every site has a "Forgot your password?" function that lets you reset it by answering a few personal questions. But how would anyone ever get access to, say, your private email account unless they somehow knew everything about you? It's not like some creepy stalker is going to somehow know the name of the town your mother was born in.

Well, unless they know how to type "Facebook.com" into the address bar.

Again, this isn't some paranoid hypothetical situation here. Twenty-three-year-old George Bronk, for instance, followed a multistep plan to not only obtain nude pictures of his Facebook friends, but ruin their lives as well. First he'd study up on the profiles of women who listed their email addresses on their Facebook accounts. He'd learn their favorite color, mother's maiden name, birthday, high school mascot, first car, hometown, favorite book, dog's name, etc.

Then he'd log in to their email accounts and skip the password, because unless it was "CRAZYGEORGELOL," he didn't know it. Instead, George would wait for the security questions like "What is your mother's maiden name?" or "Who is your A #1 stalker?" Thanks to his snooping, he usually knew the answer, giving him access to his victims' private emails.

By this point, the guy was in post-douche territory, so he must have figured, "Why stop here? I'm only a hair away from becoming Satan himself!" He scanned the "sent" files for nude pictures of his victims, then sent those pictures to himself and everyone in their address book. Then he logged in to their Facebook accounts and posted them there.

Being the classy guy he was, Bronk would occasionally refrain from posting the pictures -- only to use them as leverage. In other words, blackmail. Once caught in October 2010, investigators discovered that he had victimized 46 women in 17 states with over 172 email files that had explicit photographs attached. He has been sentenced to four years in state prison, where, we have to assume, he will be occupied with a different level of stalker activity.

2 All of Your Wireless Cameras Are Easily Hacked

You can get wireless video cameras at any Walmart these days, and people use them as baby monitors, as security cameras and to record their hit one-man shows on YouTube. So what, now are we going to tell you that total strangers outside your home can tap right into that and use your own cameras to spy on you?

You bet your ass they can.

In a manner that shocked even the police, a news station in Indiana teamed up with a private investigation firm and, armed with nothing but cheap handheld devices, they found that they could tap into home security cameras basically at will. The world was their reality show, but with presumably much less sex and more people sitting at their computers looking at Facebook. The problem is that once people set up their wireless security systems and see that the cameras work, they think they're done, never bothering to take the next step and secure the network.

And if you have a video baby monitor, guess what? Creepers everywhere can watch your child sleep. Don't be too alarmed, though, because some baby monitors are secured and can't be tapped into. And just when you thought your child couldn't be any more expensive, you find out those fancy-pants monitors cost around $200.

We'd say it's worth it.

1 Your Shopping Habits Reveal More Than You Think

Look, you know by now that if you order a vibrator on Amazon, the next time you show up it's going to recommend Fifty Shades of Grey to you. With the ability to track what you buy, often across different sites, retailers know how to predict what you're going to buy next. But where it gets really creepy is when they start trying to predict your every move, and then follow you into real life.

Even when you shop in the real world, retailers track when you start developing patterns in what you buy. Then they'll start sending coupons for things you're more likely to buy next. So let's say you have a big change in your life, like, say, a pregnancy. And you're going to immediately drop everything to take care of that baby's needs, because if you don't it will shit all over you. There's a good bet that your nearest department store will know about it before you've even told your friends.

For instance, in 2002, Target made it a goal to figure out when their customers were pregnant. If they could capture a woman's loyalty when she was preparing for the big event, they'd have her forever. So Target figured out 25 products that pregnant women were likely to buy (vitamins, unscented lotion, cotton balls, etc). And then when they saw a customer buying those things, they started sending coupons for, say, baby cribs and nipple cream.

That's why one angry dad accosted a Target manager for spamming his teen daughter with their baby ads. As if his little girl was having sex!

Then said dad had to apologize a few days later when he found out that she actually was pregnant, and that Target had figured it out before he did. Yes, this corporation knew how to pick up on cues about this girl's most intimate behaviors better than the father who lived with her. Her pregnancy was a secret to her family, but not to this $70 billion a year retailer.

And the creepiest part of all is that they're trying not to be creepy about it. Much like when you stalk someone's Facebook before meeting them and then pretend not to know things about them, Target is now hiding the baby ads next to things like lawnmowers, to pretend it was all just a coincidence. One of their experts put it this way:

And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn't been spied on, she'll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don't spook her, it works.

So ... yay for not spooking anyone, Target.

Eric Yosomono writes for GaijinAss.com and has a Facebook page here. You can startle Itzhak back into happiness at czukori@yahoo.com. Follow Lee Phan on Twitter at satiricalrhythm.

For more reasons to be careful online, check out 5 Wacky Internet Pranks That Can Get You Jail Time and 5 Seemingly Innocent Ways You Risk Your Identity Every Day.

If you're pressed for time and just looking for a quick fix, then check out The Explosive Breaking Bad Alternate Ending You Didn't See.

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