Is Pointless Geotagging Disturbing?
In a recent blog post, Glenn Letham from the AnyGeo blog questions the privacy issues of geotagging, ie attach a geographic location to an item posted online. The geo blogger takes the example of this photographer who took the picture of two women, posted it in Flickr (where he puts all of his work), filled in the associated geolocation info, hence making it possible to spot where the two ladies live.
With a click of the mouse I could see exactly where he captured the photograph of the two women - the location was a home in a residential neighborhood.Using other online search tools, local search, white pages, reverse geocoding etc… I’m sure I could have also easily determined the names, address and phone number of a girl in the photo… a bit disturbing, right??
So is it disturbing? The first thing to consider is the context in which geolocation is applied. For example, when the social network Friendfeed integrated a geolocation feature, blogger Duncan Reiley (and a plethora of other bloggers) questioned the necessity to localize blog posts: “Cool is for bragging rights and yes it is really cool that the FriendFeed team figured out how to do this but man what a totally pointless feature.” In some way, the Techcrunch ex-blogger also questions the need to automatically geotag user-generated content.
Geotagging is growing as a main component of our online activities since mobile phones have built-in GPS, which is accessible to any given application on the phone operating on the phone. Since this, all those applications have been playing around with this GPS-enabled feature: Geo-locate your tweets, your Brightkite videos, your friends (Loopt), or simply yourself. In those cases, except for a few rare exceptions, geolocation is totally useless.
The question now has turned into this: “Is the pointless use of geotagging disturbing?” Ten years ago, there was no way I would use my real name anywhere online, whether it be in a chat room, forum, or social game (those are the only pre-Web 2.0 social tools I can think of). We all felt that the online world was just not secure enough. Today, Facebook makes everyone use their real names online. And we don’t mind going for it because there is a secure dedicated platform out there that makes sense out of using our real names: it enables us to recognize each other online. We do not have the Facebook equivalent for geolocation. No search engine crawls a database of geolocated info to tell us who was where at what time. We don’t even know what it could used for. We are facing our own ignorance, it creeps us out, and we get into the usual shortcomings of the human mind: sexual predators, child kidnappers, psychopathic stalkers, terrorists…
But with a little psychology wisdom, I think we should get some perspective on our geolocated lives, and realize that it is just a mere reflection of our offline existence. Interpreting the unknown with irrational fears is so typical that I wonder why we still do it…
Tags: disturbing geotagging anygeo friendfeed geo gps
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