How the internet hunted down an "Anonymous" employee, using his

own photo
By Marian Davidoaia

You know what’s awful? Fearing that your food has been… defiled in some way , which
is why people were enraged in 2012 when a viral photo was posted to 4chan of an
unseen employee standing atop two bins of the shredded lettuce speeding into a fast
food.
A strange mystery without hint of who might have done it or where, inspiring the
looming dread of paranoia to fester within the backs of our minds…
Until, Burger King caught the people involved regardless and fired them.
Despite how little information it seems they reveal, pictures say a thousand words…
Meet John McAfee—Entrepreneur, computer programmer, and creator of McAfee anti-
virus. He himself came face to face with the danger that stray photographs can pose
when a photo was posted to the internet during his time in Central America.
McAfee’s Bizarre Adventure led him to move to Belize in 2008, where he was
suspected of making drugs, which led to a local police raid on his home.
November, 2012, McAfee was listed as a person of interest by the Belize government
after his neighbor was found dead in a pool of blood.Upon seeing the police approaching
his compound in the jungle, he buried himself in the sand and covered his head with a
cardboard box, and then he waited for hours.
McAfee believed that the suspicious death had been targeted at him but hit his neighbor
by mistake. So he went on the run, fearing that if police managed to capture him, he
would get the gulag treatment. He feared that the Belize government was trying to rid
itself of him after he claimed to run criminal enterprises out of a local town, and refused
to pay bribe money to a local politician.
Ok, that’s gotta be paranoia, right?
Well, that’s certainly what Belize’s Prime Minister Dean Barrow stated, calling the
claims, “utter and complete nonsense.”
But paranoia or not, he seemingly vanished with only a photo as evidence to his
continued survival.
A photo that revealed that he had in fact vanished from Belize.
Our culprit lies within the camera itself. Here’s the thing about cameras these days,
they’re smart.
Most digital cameras these days will write a certain amount of data to any photo they
take. Now with DSLRs, it’s fairly standard to see information for shutter speed, aperture,
and ISO settings. That is to say the lighting settings used by the camera. This data is also
known as EXIF data, which is short for “EXchangeable Image File format”.
Most photography focused social media sites like flickr and 500px will show this data,
and you can also view this information in the properties of a photo file on your
computer.
Phones today have advanced GPS systems that can track you down to an exact
longitude and latitude. And that goes straight into your EXIF data when you take a photo
with GPS tracking on.
During his time on the run, McAfee was visited by Vice editor-in-chief Rocco Castoro
and photographer Robert King who took a photo of Castoro posing with McAfee which
was then posted in an article about the antivirus magnate’s time on the run, including a
body double who had been arrested at the Mexican border with a Hermit Kingdom
passport under McAfee’s name. Which was apparently a ruse to obfuscate his actual
location.
Internet sleuths looked into the image and found out that Vice kind of sort of forgot
about the EXIF data. In addition to the device information and camera settings, the
photo had details on where and when the photo was taken, down to the exact longitude
and latitude he was at when they ‘snapped the pic’ as the kids say.
At first, both McAfee and the photographer tried to claim that the location included in
the EXIF data was a ruse meant to mislead those looking for McAfee. Which, itself was
actually a ruse.
The data was correct, and McAfee soon had to hire a lawyer because he’d, you know
Snuck across the border into Guatemala without his passport.
So, how do you look at this EXIF data anyway? It’s pretty easy. Generally you just
download the photo, and view it’s properties to see details. So if someone sends you a
photo from their phone of some amazing looking coffee, you can find out everything
from what model of phone they’re using, to which cafe they’re at right now.
Well, many popular social media sites like Facebook, Imgur, Instagram, and Twitter
prevent other users from accessing your data.
Can’t help but notice the emphasis on “users” there. Well, yes. In the words of Hany
Farid, a professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley: “You
can almost certainly be assured they are not throwing it away, given that they’re
basically big data vacuum cleaners,”Which was confirmed by a Facebook spokesperson
in an email to Consumer Reports.
In the statement, Facebook said that they do collect, quote, “information like the make
and model of the device used to take the photo, the camera settings, and the date the
photo was taken… to make your experience better and to keep people safe.”
So what happened to our subjects who had their locations leaked via photographs? Well,
in the case of John McAfee… he was arrested in Guatemala, and then expelled to the US
on a flight to Miami. He remained a person of interest in Belize and was later found
liable for his neighbor’s death in a lawsuit, though not in a criminal trial.
He was later arrested in the Dominican Republic for possession of illegal firearms on
his yacht in 2019. He ran for the United States Presidential election in 2020, though he
later ended his campaign and instead asked to run as Vice President for Vermin
Supreme.
Most recently, he was arrested by the United States in 2020 for tax evasion.
In the case of the Burger King lettuce boots, the culprits decided to upload their image
to 4chan.
A website that does not remove EXIF data, and whose denizens were… upset at the idea
of someone standing in their burger components. The users used the geotagging data to
determine exactly which Burger King the photos had been taken at, and went about
informing the company and the local media.
Yeah… the three employees got fired. No matter how comfortable we may have become
with them, it’s important to remember that much of the technology we use on a daily
basis will keep tabs on us, if allowed to. And if we want privacy, we have to keep an eye
on what settings we use.
Don’t want to be tracked?
Turn off your GPS, double check your photo settings, and maybe check out our video on
cyber security and whether or not your devices are listening to you right now.
After all, a picture can say a thousand words, but sometimes it just needs one — “Fired”.

[The Burger King Employees Standing on Lettuce] https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/o...

https://www.cleveland.com/hillcrest/2... https://www.today.com/money/feet-lett...
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[John McAfee’s Bizarre Adventure] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-2...

https://www.wired.com/2012/12/ff-john... https://www.thesun.co.uk/archives/new...

https://images.vice.com/motherboard/c... https://www.flickr.com/photos/foreign...

https://www.vice.com/en/article/z44mb... https://gizmodo.com/vice-magazine-jus...

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-w... https://www.vice.com/en/article/yv5ky...

https://www.flickr.com/photos/dodnews... https://youtu.be/HxRLsWKYA6Q https://youtu.be/RVqExnY9pTY

https://youtu.be/W6uGP8hHwrQ https://assets.vice.com/content-image... https://www.cnet.com/news/john-

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