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From the NY Times: Your cat may never give up your secrets. But your cat photos might.
Using cat pictures - that essential building block of the Internet - and a supercomputer, a Florida State University professor has built a site that shows the locations of the cats (at least at some point in time, given their nature) and, presumably, of their owners.
Owen Mundy, an assistant professor of art who studies the relationship between data and the public, created "I Know Where Your Cat Lives" as a way of demonstrating "the status quo of personal data usage by startups and international megacorps who are riding the wave of decreased privacy for all," Mr. Mundy wrote in a post about the site.
Using images of cats uploaded to photosharing services, including Flickr, Twitpic and Instagram, Mr. Mundy extracted latitude and longitude coordinates that many modern cameras, especially those in smartphones, attach to each image. His site displays random images from a sample of one million of what Mr. Mundy estimates are at least 15 million pictures tagged with the word "cat" online.
(Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Wednesday July 23 2014, @05:25PM
More precisely, it tells you where the camera was the last time it could get a GPS fix.
Newer cameras just leave out the coordinates from the EXIF info without a fix, but older
ones, especially in older cell phones just drop what ever they last had in there.
I know some paranoid people leave the camera GPS off on purpose. Not me.
Just about all my photos these days are GPS tagged. Its very useful if you travel.
I've got tons of old pictures from past trips in the pre GPS camera days that I can't even figure out what state/province I was in at the time other than by painstakingly comparing time and date on a bunch of shots and estimating traveling speed.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 23 2014, @07:44PM
> I know some paranoid people leave the camera GPS off on purpose. Not me.
Iphone lets you control it on a per-app basis. So turn it off for facebook/instagram and you don't have to worry about accidentally uploading your gps coordinates for the world to see. But you still get them in your regular photo app for your own purposes.
I'd like to see a smart GPS spoofer. Such that if you are in a pre-specified geofence it spoofs it with a pre-specified location somewhere else. Put fences around your home, work, kids school, basically any location you go to frequently and it would use a fake location. Anywhere else, it would use the real thing. That reduces the chance that you can be located by your photos in the places you need would need the GPS info the least but preserves it for those cases where you would need it but also pose the least risk to you if a stalker gets ahold of it.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday July 23 2014, @08:22PM
GPS tagging of photos is an option on every Android phone I've ever used.
I think a better option is to not upload photos of your kids PERIOD.
Facebook got so much grief for this that they remove EXIF data from all photos.
There are Chrome plugins that let you read EXIF info just by hovering the courser over any image.
Makes testing this really quick.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.