Christmas Geotagging | Hacker News Reader

Christmas Geotagging

tommycollison.com

40 pointsthedg24 comments

Does anyone here remember those huge catalogs of everyone's home address? I recall they were full of yellow and white pages.

I'm not sure what the point is here...if someone knows your name they can often simply look up your home address online (or in an anachronism).

Even social security numbers are available online for people who have died: http://ssdmf.info/

I can sympathize with the idea that people should be able to live private lives, but what Instagram is doing doesn't seem particularly notable.

The argument isn't "Instagram is publishing people's locations," it's "People are allowing lots of services, Instagram among them, to publish their location, and it's harder to participate in modern society while reliably opting out of all of them."

It used to be the case that you could call up the phone company and say, please leave me out of the phone book. It still is. But there are so many more ways to learn your address today, and as always with security, it only takes one oversight to be compromised.

There's nothing unique about what Instagram is doing. They're one of several services other than the phone company that can leak your location if you're not being constantly vigilant. They're not notable, and that's the real story.

actually, it's really easy to avoid publishing your location. Turn off GPS.

This precludes Google Maps usage, though, which is frustrating to say the least.

I share frustrations with Facebook pinging for my location on my phone when I'm not doing anything linked to my location. But here, on Instagram, there's a very obvious "Add to Photo Map" button (which is off by default!), so these people opted in to this.

This precludes Google Maps usage, though, which is frustrating to say the least.

You can use Google Maps and its GPS feature without a Google account. Then Google knows where your phone is, and you know where you are, but Google doesn't know who you are.

By this logic, 'The argument isn't "Instagram is publishing people's locations," it's "People are allowing lots of services, Instagram among them, to publish their location, and it's harder to participate in modern society while reliably opting out of all of them."'

shouldn't only people who would opt-out of a phonebook listing be concerned? I would definitely not be in that group, but am concerned with the modern situation. I see the automated and large scale compilation and cross-referencing of these data as the dangerous part.

I think what's missing here is that generally a phonebook requires that I know your first and last name, that you be the person listed in the phone book (and not, say, their kid or even their spouse), and that I can choose you from all the other Michael Smiths in the book.

Lastly, even then, your address is not updated by the second. It could be out of date. And I certainly wouldn't know what your living room looked like.

Instagram et.al provides your actual location. Often, at that very moment. Not the same at all.

Also, as I recall, the white pages usually only published names and numbers. Some people had addresses included. Yellow Pages was only business listings, which included addresses obviously, but I think that's a feature not a bug. Anyone know what % of white pages listings had addresses?

You're totally right. But I think it's interesting to pick a bunch of random Instagram users in your area whose address you now know who start posting photos that are geotagged out of town. Now you know where they live and that they're not in their house right now.

I've got a friend who works as a correctional officer in a German "open prison". When the inmates leave for home on weekends some of them are forbidden from consuming alcohol, drugs, contact certain people, visit certain areas.

According to my friend the most effective tool to check up on those inmates is Facebook. Quite a few of them just can't resist to post drunk party pictures, brag about stuff they shouldn't be doing, etc.

Another way they use Facebook is to detect if someone's using a mobile phone - which are forbidden on the compound: Simply check the inmates' profiles and see which inmates who are not on leave are online.

There's that quote that says that Facebook made possible what KGB, Stasi and the likes couldn't ever dream to achieve. So yeah ...

"There's that quote that says that Facebook made possible what KGB, Stasi and the likes couldn't ever dream to achieve." - you only have to look at who originally funded [1] Facebook to see why.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/25-cutting-edge-companies-fun...

So Instagram geotags photos when the user agrees to enable geotagging. And photos on public feeds are public.

I'm not seeing how this is unexpected or newsworthy. It just sounds like there are folks out there who don't consider their location to be a secret. Folks who do are able to communicate that by denying the geotagging permission.

How many folks who answer "yes" to geotagging actually know what they're saying yes to? Are there any who say "yes" because they click yes to all dialog boxes?

How many of them intend to publicize the location of pretty pictures they take while traveling, but haven't thought about publicizing their home address?

Note that even Foursquare, bastion of not considering your location a secret, fuzzes home addresses/GPS locations if you somehow decide it's a good idea to check in to your home, even though they publish exact locations of everywhere else you go.

I'm sure there are a number of users who are intentionally geotagging all their pictures, and thinking about the fact they do so every time they hit publish. The author probably just doesn't expect that that number is 100%.

This was (or maybe still is) one of the most troubling things about Twitter's location services feature. When someone tweets and chooses to share their location, the label appears something vague like "Pittsburgh" or "New York City".

They may not be aware that the precise coordinates of where the tweet was sent, possibly narrowing down not just where they are, but even what room they are in, is shared with anyone and everyone.

Isn't the point more that geotagging of not your home still tends to inadvetantly reveal it, since statistically you'll tag things in an approximate radii of where you live?

I don't think that's the point, given that the article is talking about tagging the Christmas tree in your living room.

The point isn't just identifying where you live. It's where you go. If the crowd you move in exists in some anti-them ecosystem, perhaps it is guilty by suspicion or retroactively.

I think geotagging, like other image metadata, is far less obvious to the general public than it should be because the location information isn't directly visible most of the time; maybe if cameras that geotagged photos showed their GPS coordinates in the same way that timestamps are shown, people would get the idea.

It's funny how many people will think you're a "hacker" and be very shocked if you reply to a geotagged photo they casually sent with a map pointing to exactly where it was taken. :-)

The default Photos app on iOS displays the location directly above the timestamp.

This is actually a pretty rudimentary use of Instagram's location features. On Friday I am releasing a site where you can monitor specific physical addresses for Instagram posts and get alerts in realtime - regardless of who posts them. Right now I am working on some pre-built feeds for celebrity homes (see inside celebrity holiday parties etc), major concerts and sports events, and news events (protests in New York etc).

Because Instagram geotags by default, it poses some really interesting privacy challenges and tradeoffs. If you are privacy sensitive, shutoff Instagram's access to your location.

It should be noted that it's extremely easy to scrape geotag information or any public hashtag feed via the Instagram API.

http://instagram.com/developer/

EDIT: Here's a very quick map of all the #tree tweets on Instagram in the past hour or so: http://i.imgur.com/D66r3Ui.png

You could probably easily tell where anyone lives with the geotagging feature just by looking at breakfast and dinner photos.

This site pairs geotagged photos with Google Street View. It's heartwarmingly creepy. By default, right now it's following #christmas, but here's the view of #tree:

http://sm.rutgers.edu/thebeat/?q=tree

So do people with numbers listed in the phonebook.

and for some reason instagram always has to grab my GPS location when I open it. hmmm gtfo.

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