Privacy Alert: Cat photos and your home addresses

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charliesmom

charliesmom

Member Since 2012
Hi guys,

There is a documentary film festival coming up in Amsterdam, and I just noticed there is a film called "I know where your cat lives" on the list. Apparently, a project was done to show just how easy it is to get people's personal data by accessing the data embedded within photographs. The example here is with cat photos and peoples' addresses, but it's a bit creepy.

If you go to this website, you can read the background on the project. You can also click on "back to the map" at the top to to see if your home address is shown along with the photos you have previously posted online of your cat. Then, obviously, take them down and/or delete the metadata and re-upload. Food for thought!

iknowwhereyourcatlives.com

If this thread is relevant to those in another forum, feel free to repost it wherever it will get most seen so people can be made aware of it.

Cheers,
Jill
 
funny.... but not funny.

I'm glad to see mine isn't there. I was able to click on the map until I got to my state, town and street.....
geez....

must be all those facebook people.... :?
 
Apparently, this project was done with cats just to show people how much "personally identifiable information" is attached to photos. The guy who did this project learned that his photos of his young daughter that were posted online showed his exact home address, and that freaked him out.

So all in all, a message about taking down photos that you have uploaded if you haven't erased the metadata that is in each image (which you can do with software).

Just a head's up!

Enjoy the weekend everyone,
Jill
 
i have no idea how that works, jill. do you mean that ordinary photos taken with a camera somehow have address info attached to them? Or would that just be cell phone pics?

how can you know if a picture has that kind of info attached to it?
 
The closest "cat" to me is actually a fish, and there is a Japanese anime pic, not even a cat also nearby.

As an example of addresses, if you load pictures onto Google's Picasaweb, it asks you if you want to show the location. I've seen at least one member on here who has kitty photos and when I go look at them, it displays the photo locations. I said No to the option to display location for my pics.
 
My camera is at least 8 years old and I suspect it doesn't have that feature - it's a nice but traditional 35mm. I don't think it knows where it is. ;-) I wonder about my husband's cell phone, though. it likely does have GPS and i occasionally take pics with it. Will have to check that one - thanks.
 
I just went through all the photos in my Picassa albums. I did find a couple that had a location indicated, although it was off by a couple of blocks. You can hide the locations.
  • -- go to your albums
    -- select an album
    -- select a photo
    -- on the right hand side click on "full details page", this will open a new window
    -- on the right hand side of this new window click on the arrow by "photo details"
    -- if there is a location it will show a map and you can click on "hide"
I'll be really careful to not let locations show in the future!
 
Whew! We aren't on here. But the aerial picture was taken in November/December of 2012. You can see the digger in our backyard digging out our pool. :lol:
 
Thanks for the link. It's very interesting. Thanks for sharing it with us. I hope you are doing well.
I didn't see any pictures of mine. Weird, how they can track that stuff.
 
The site leaves a cookie on your computer. I wonder if it is another avenue to tracking you. If you have looked up your address, this site definitely knows where you live! To be safe, go into your internet browser to the page where you can "manage cookies". Find "Iknowwhereyourcatlives" and delete it. This may be over cautious, but with the Internet you never know!

Ella
 
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