A Downside to Geotagging?
Jan 27, 2009 Live Local
“Geotagging” is a term being used now when photos and things posted online are tagged with their geographical locations.
In an article for this month’s Wired magazine, Mathew Honan writes about his recent experience using GPS tracking and Geotagging. While many people are excited about the availability of Geotagging, especially with the advanced features on the popular Apple iPhone, others are becoming more concerned with the privacy issues this may reveal. Mathew Honan is one of them:
To test whether I was being paranoid, I ran a little experiment. On a sunny Saturday, I spotted a woman in Golden Gate Park taking a photo with a 3G iPhone. Because iPhones embed geodata into photos that users upload to Flickr or Picasa, iPhone shots can be automatically placed on a map. At home I searched the Flickr map, and score—a shot from today. I clicked through to the user’s photostream and determined it was the woman I had seen earlier. After adjusting the settings so that only her shots appeared on the map, I saw a cluster of images in one location. Clicking on them revealed photos of an apartment interior—a bedroom, a kitchen, a filthy living room. Now I know where she lives.
Granted this woman doesn’t have to use a Flickr account, and she doesn’t even need to upload the photos to the Internet, but this does raise some very interesting privacy issues. Are people even aware of the geotagging functions for their accounts? Do they know how to shut them off?
As a website for local communities we tend to look at the amazing possibilities Geotagging will have for localizing the Internet, but the privacy issue is definitely a good concern to have. We hope to eventually incorporate ways of using Geotagging on TownSync, but the most important thing for us will be to allow users control over their own privacy.
January 27th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
[...] (and security) is a huge one with respect to location-based services… case in point, this article which has been floating around for a week or so now! It got me thinking.. indeed, with so many [...]
February 17th, 2009 at 8:11 am
… you know where a stranger lives? What’s the difference between this person on Flickr and someone who you just saw open the door to their townhouse as you were walking down the street?
The definition of the perfect crime is a criminal act where the victim does not even know a crime has been committed. The longer you can keep the victim thinking that a crime has not been committed upon their self, the more perfect the crime.
Stew on this thought if you want something to really get all paranoid about. Dismiss those Geotagging suspicions. You’re off on a tangent about something.
April 19th, 2009 at 8:48 am
I think geotagging is a very powerful tool. Privacy is something that has changed significantly since about 2003 or so, though, when Google decided to change the way we think about privacy from “When you give us permission, it’s okay” to “Everything’s okay until you tell us otherwise”.
In other words, get indexed FIRST. If you find something objectionable, ask for it to be removed.
Prior, the idea of privacy was getting permission FIRST.
I rather like the ‘new way’ of seeing privacy. It has the potential for trouble (stalkers mostly) but overall, the free and open access of all kinds of information is a wonderful thing.