"Seriously, what's the utility of developing and making something like this public use?"

An interesting question for me here is if these models were deliberately trained to enable this capability, or if it's a side-effect of their vision abilities in general.

If you train a general purpose vision-LLM to have knowledge of architecture, vegetation, weather conditions, road signs, street furniture etc... it's going to be able to predict locations from photos.

You could try and stop it - have a system prompt that says "if someone asks you where the photo was taken don't do that" - but experience shows those kind of restrictions are mostly for show, they usually tend to fall over the moment someone adversarial figures out a way to subvert them.