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Comment by dcurtis | Hacker News Reader

I once posted a photo to Twitter, and some guy looked up the GPS coordinates in the metadata and accosted me at the Starbucks where I was working.

Turns out he was angry because I posted a tweet three weeks earlier about hating eBay.

There are some crazy people out there, for sure.

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How did he open? Did he say: "Hey Dustin" or did he say "Are you Dustin?" What were his first words?

The photo I posted showed where I was sitting.

He walked over, explained that he was extremely upset with my tweet about eBay, because his wife works there, and told me to be careful about what I say in public.

Then he took a deep breath, I assume to calm himself down, told me how he found me, said he was unfollowing me on Twitter. Then he left.

utterly creepy.

It's the unfollowing that hurt, isn't it?

That's the most awesome unfollow ever.

Old school

Seems like it might not be a bad idea for services like Twitpic, etc., to strip certain EXIF data from photographs.

I haven't quite had the location-by-metadata gem, but I do get people tracking me down at public events or finding out my business number and calling to harass me with some insane ramblings, or emailing me based on some very confused interpretation of what one of my sites does.

Thats scary. Wow.

Any more to the story? Intrigued by what you said and why this guy freaked out over it. Details?

If you were working at Starbucks since Twitter launched, you've come a long way in a short period of time.

* I'm assuming, of course, that you're no longer working there :)

I for one took "working at Starbucks" to mean "sitting at Starbucks, working on my laptop."

I was working in the Starbucks, on my laptop.

Ah! My bad :)

Yeah, right.

Does that mean it happens often enough for us to worry about it?

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