Geo tagging

 

I saw an article in the New York Times today (here) about the dangers of geo tagging photos. Like any technology you have to know how it can be used as well as misused.

I wonder in the future if "photo thieves" will one day be extracting geotag info from photos to duplicate the same shot right down to the same month, day and minute the photo was taken. I took the photo above a few years ago of hikers on Jasper Ridge located in the Maze District of Canyonlands National Park. I have recorded the day and the time I took the photo, but if anyone wanted to return to

duplicate this photo and capture the shadows as I have they would need to stand exactly where I stood when I made the photo. I don't know that exact spot. A GPS attached to my camera would have been a big help to mark the exact spot or close enough. 

I always thought geotagging would be a cool feature as a fall back so you didn't have to always have to write in location info in a photos meta data, but I wonder if there's such a thing as giving too much away about where and how a photo was taken. Sometimes maybe a little mystery is a good thing.

Comments

[Michael Hunter]

Stripping tags or providing disinformation via bogus tags is not that hard. I suspect once people become aware of meta data being attached to photos this will become a non issue. It won't become any different then managing other places we mix information of varying levels of privacy.