By Dan on January 24, 2016
Most people are completely unaware that their phone embeds location data in every photo they take. It’s called geotagging and it’s such a big part of mobile photography that you can’t use many camera apps on an iPhone without enabling location data (see http://www.igeeksblog.com/disable-geotagging-for-photos-on-iphone-ipad/ ). While geotagging photos has some great benefits like being able to map all your vacation photos so you can see exactly where you went, it can have a dark side in the wrong hands. It’s relatively easy to stalk someone simply by looking at geotagged data of all the photos they post online. You don’t need access to their device for this. The implication here for education is when you have a group of young students posting photos online from some assignment or field trip. Even if they do not appear in the photo themselves (perhaps they took a photo of a cat), their location data is still embedded in the photo and this means that child’s location could be tracked. To illustrate this point, researchers created a demo where they track cats all over the world. Check it out at: http://iknowwhereyourcatlives.com/
There are other downsides to geotagging as well, particular in relation to the instagram culture that popularizes certain nature spaces.
Vox did a great video covering this phenomenon and some of that ways that natural habits are being damaged due to their popularization as viral places on instagram.
“What happens when nature goes viral?” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Itjc14Fm-gs
In some ways, we have touched upon this issue in some posts and discussions in the last week. However, I decided to include it as part of my Mobile Culture resource review from older posts because of its prevalence and relevance. This post is from 2016, but is even more applicable today. As Dan mentions in his post, geotagging is both useful and convenient, not just for vacations and field trips, but even everyday life – from exploring new cafes and stores to parks and hiking trails. It is not fair to say that geotagging or the availability of digital location data has a causation relationship to stalking, but having this information so easily accessible at our fingertips does make it easier. It is quite easy to hide behind a screen and explore the tiniest of details, as seen from this 2019 article: https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/11/20910551/stalker-attacked-pop-idol-reflection-pupils-selfies-videos-photos-google-street-view-japan.
While simply turning “Location” or geotagging off might sound like a reasonable solution, it is not the most ideal or elegant solution. The feature has been created to be used and is very good at it’s job. As a society, if we can understand that stalking is not acceptable in real life and has dire consequences, why can we not translate that to the digital world? As a good upstanding civic citizen, we abide by laws and societal norms, why can’t we do the same online? Kids of today have not known a world without technology and it is our responsibility to have these discussions of digital citizenship. When we approach these topics with openness and use them as a learning/teaching opportunity with a critical lens, instead of shutting them down due to fear, we will be able to open more (and hopefully, safer) avenues of conversation and media use. Of course, vigilance is always appropriate, and here is a resource to help remove the hidden “meta-data” from one’s photos before posting them online: https://us.norton.com/internetsecurity-how-to-how-to-remove-gps-and-other-metadata-locations-from-photos.html – this way, one can still have the geotags for personal information, but can be removed from the public sphere.
Do you all think this is a useful feature, or is it unnecessary?