AI-Powered Image Analysis Enables Scammers to Infer Photo Locations and Personalize Attacks
2026-08-16 | incident | rights, economic
Our take
McAfee reports that open models can guess where a travel photo was taken about nine times out of ten. Scammers were already using this feature.
The facts
McAfee Labs found that AI models like Google's Gemma 3 and Alibaba's Qwen 3 can accurately identify locations in 87–91% of travel photos, even without GPS data. Scammers exploit this AI capability to personalize phishing attacks, raising privacy and cybersecurity risks for social media users worldwide.