Scammers Can Use AI Tools to Pinpoint Your Location Based on a Photo
KnowBe4, Tuesday, July 14th, 2026
McAfee research shows freely available AI models can geolocate travel photos with roughly 90% accuracy, fueling targeted scams.
KnowBe4 highlights McAfee research showing that freely available AI models can identify where a photo was taken with about 90% accuracy.
In testing, Gemma3 27B correctly identified the city and country of a travel photo 87% of the time, while a competing model reached 91%.
That capability lets threat actors convert generic phishing attempts into highly targeted social engineering by mining publicly shared social media images. Attackers can combine inferred location with other public information to construct believable, personalized pretexts at scale.
The post frames location intelligence as a meaningful new reconnaissance vector that security awareness programs should address.