Plotting the Geocoordinates You May Have Accidentally Left Behind in Photos
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
Consider one thing I saw- the guy said he lived in north Dakota publicly, and had a photo looking out of his garage. Visible was the street name on a signpost, and the house number across from him. Completely innocuous, but it's way more than enough to narrow him down completely. EXIF is easy, but to stay anon properly is hard.
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/04/21/us/project-vic-child-abuse...
Paranoid idea is that the NSA could use these online games to do... something.
Of course, that wouldn't work for people landing landscape photos, but it might work for say, someone posting an image confirming their identity or showing a document or item they're in possession of.
I believe that to be a privacy-conscious person, one has to grasp the range of information one's every action leaves around. Which is way broader than most people seem to imagine.
C.f. Vexs's top-level comment here.
I'm trying to grasp this phenomenon - why would people think that people will see only the one intended thing on the photo, and then get creeped out if someone focuses on something else? It seems to be connected with a common creativity blocker (and stupidity promoter) - thinking that items have inherent purpose and cannot be used beyond it. The kind of thinking that makes people give up on repairing a thing because they don't have the proper screwdriver, even though they have half a dozen knives in the kitchen that could do the work just fine.
What I find similar here is projection of human intent onto the real world. In the repair case, it's projecting the intent of the tool makers (and merchants) onto the tools themselves (screwdriver is for unscrewing screws, vegetable knives is for cutting vegetables) like if they were unbreakable laws of physics. The privacy case seems to be projecting your own intent for the photo onto the photo itself. Like, thinking "this photo is intended to show to my close friends how cool and pretty I am", and then getting offended ("it's creepy!") that someone notices some details of the background.
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[0] - Or at least, for goodness' sake, photoshop the living shit out of them. Like, heavily blur and distort anything that is not your face.
[1] - That's "NSA paranoia"-level privacy, but for some people it can be a realistic threat model.
As a lapsed physicist (now developing software for electrical engineering) I am often bemused by this sort of thing. But after some thought I concluded that it is to some extent an artefact of education. In my own field I often see people generate over complicated solutions for the same reasons. It seems to me that the physicist's way of working is best: assume that everything is an instance of the same type until proven otherwise, resist the temptation to create new entities and explanations, generalise. But my colleagues with engineering degrees have exactly the opposite behaviour: treat every object and situation as special.
> [1] - That's "NSA paranoia"-level privacy, but for some people it can be a realistic threat model.
Assuming you do use a digital camera (so there is no developer involved), and your camera is not wireless enabled (so that the only way to disseminate the photos is for you to elect to do it), what is the threat model here?
That said, it's very much a corner case - after all, a typical person will eventually plug the camera to the computer for viewing or archiving purposes.
Sorry; in fact that's what I meant to ask. Is a wired connection to a non-networked computer from a non-wireless enabled digital camera safe, or is there some non-obvious threat even there?