PHOTO buffs who use your camera-enabled mobile phones to take snapshots wherever you go, be warned.

This act may divulge more information about you than your photographic abilities, according to CNet.

Pictures taken with newer- generation cellphones can reveal your exact location through a technology known as geotagging.

The geographical location of where photos were taken - in the form of latitude and longitude coordinates - is encoded, and anyone who has a copy of the photos can access this information.

When posted on social-networking sites or blogs, the photos - with the geographical coordinates analysed - can reveal such information as where you live, who you live with, who you go out with and your commuting patterns.

At the Next Hope hacker conference in New York last Friday, a security researcher showed that he was able to scan more than 2.5 million photo links posted on Twitter and extract exact latitude and longitude coordinates embedded in over 65,000 photos - without the Twitter users' knowledge.

It is an intrusion of privacy, said Mr Ben Jackson of Mayhemic Labs, an independent security- research team, as quoted in CNet.

For example, one geotagged photograph from an anonymous Twitter account showed a man engaging, while naked, in a sexual act by himself, he said.

Mayhemic Labs was able to identify the street address of the house and, subsequently, the names of the man and woman who lived there, according to CNet.

Location information is encoded in the Exif metadata of photos. Metadata is a term for the descriptive information embedded inside an image or another type of file.

The metadata captured by your camera is called Exif data, which stands for Exchangeable Image File Format. Most digital- photo software can display Exif information to users, but it is usually not editable.

Some smartphones, including the iPhone, offer the option to disable geotagging of photos.

However, not every smartphone owner is aware of the option of activating this privacy setting, said CNet.

To raise awareness of this issue, Mayhemic Labs has created ICanStalkU.com, a website that educates consumers about geotagging and how they can disable the geotagging function on their smartphones.