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Comment by spingsprong | Hacker News Reader

"Yahoo is hosting a contest to build the system best capable of identifying where a photo or video was taken without using geographic coordinates."

Does this strike anyone else as being a bad idea?

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I can't think of any general reasons this is bad, just very narrow cases on the individual level. What are your fears?

Privacy concerns.

Because of the inevitable photolocationfinder dot com that will immediately come into existence if they ever succeed.

Then everyone who hates someone or likes someone way too much, will only need a couple of photos from twitter or wherever, to know where to look for that person in real life.

It's not likely that a computer vision system is going to be that much better than humans at the task. Maybe it will be able to guess your latitude by the color of the sky or something crazy like that, but not give you an exact address.

It is not unreasonable to believe that an algorithm could key in on architectural peculiarities of a given region. On top of that, if there are any people who are in the photo who share their address on facebook, twitter, foursquare et. al. it is game over.

I didn't consider that. Reminds me of What Makes Paris Look Like Paris: http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/projects/whatMakesParis/

Roughly map the topology of the ground in the background of a photo, then use clever algorithms to match that topology with real world maps of terrain.

Automatically match iconic buildings to those in a database.

Have a list of features that are different from nation to nation, or region to region, and match them. Electrical outlets, road signs, road markings, fire hydrant colors, and match them automatically.

Have a list of different geology. Light coloured rock in this region, reddish soil in that region, very flat terrain, very undulating terrain.

This is what comes to mind in one minute of thought. None of these would be effective on their own, but combined you could probably get surprisingly close.

Trying to hide the location of a photo from someone who is looking at the photo seems hopeless to me.

Its better than showing someone photos and seeing if they make them happy or sad.

If you don't want something online, don't put it online.

That's like saying "if you don't want to get mobbed, don't go outside".

Most of the apps we use store data somewhere online and the privacy controls are often unclear or misleading.

Putting something online is as easy as grabbing a phone and taking a photo. Boom, it's online... somewhere.

We can't stop services like the one contest is about popping up, but the problems they cause are real.

If you don't want photos online, don't take photos with a smartphone. Pretty sure digital cameras don't autoupload (at least the cheap ones I have had). That said, we have a signal and noise situation - if everyone's photos are online it becomes difficult to target any one person without a very good reason.

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