Tracking vs Fingerprinting: Two Ways Your Photos Can Point Back to You
A serial number is tracking. Your firmware, colour profile and time zone are a fingerprint. I tested what stripping metadata removes and what it leaves.
I Couldn’t Use Google’s reCAPTCHA — So I Built My Own Bot Challenge for Clearnet, Tor, and I2P
Every mainstream bot defence needs to fingerprint your browser or phone home to a third party. We needed one mechanism that works the same on clearnet, Tor, and I2P — here’s the incident that forced the question and what we built instead.
Can you get metadata from a photo someone sent you?
Whether you can read metadata from a received photo depends on the channel, not the tool. Email and AirDrop pass the file unchanged. Messaging apps re-encode — EXIF is gone, but a compression signature takes its place.
MakerNote forensics: what camera manufacturers hide inside every photo
MakerNote is the manufacturer-written EXIF block that standard stripping tools typically leave intact — carrying lens serial numbers, shutter counts, burst UUIDs, and capture context that survives a standard privacy scrub. Its absence from a known device is equally revealing.
Your camera’s fingerprint survives EXIF stripping — here’s how
Stripping EXIF metadata doesn’t make a photo anonymous. DQT quantisation tables and Huffman coding tables are baked into the JPEG compression — a permanent camera fingerprint that survives every standard metadata strip. Two of the 60+ forensic checks snapWONDERS reads from every image.
Huey’s vision — and the decade of work to honour it
The story behind Vaultify — a father building a steganography platform in memory of his son Huey, who lost his sight at four and dreamed of photos that carry hidden stories.
Why GPS in photos is more dangerous than most people think
A single geotagged photo shows where you were once. A few dozen shows where you live, work, and go every day — and most people are still sharing photos with full GPS data attached.
What your phone photos reveal about you — and why it matters
Every photo you take on your smartphone embeds a detailed record of where you were, what device you used, and exactly when — and most people have no idea how easy it is to read.
A new direction — deep digital media forensics
After some time away, the work is moving in a new direction. Hueyify has been paused. The story behind that is personal, and it’s told in full at kennethbspringer.au/our-story. The …