A federal judge has ruled that investigators may use metadata to track sources of inappropriate photos of children, Houston Chronicle reports. In his order, U.S. District Judge Gregg Costa wrote the metadata embedded in a photo of a four-year-old girl shared online solved the "needle-in-the-haystack problem" investigators face. The perpetrator’s attorney had argued phones retrieve GPS coordinates without notifying users, so “although the image was contraband, the legitimate expectation of privacy as to location and identity is not rendered unreasonable.” Costa disagreed, writing, "He gave up his right to privacy in that image once he uploaded it to the Internet … There is no basis for divvying up the image … into portions that are now public and portions in which he retains a privacy interest."
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