Michael Zimmer.org

The New York Times recently extolled the virtues of using GPS in digital cameras and camera cellphones to “geotag” photos with the location at which they were taken:

…advocates of geotagging, like Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of the photo-sharing Web site Flickr, contend that linking pictures to maps can lend a new dimension to photography. For one thing, it can help people make some sense of the mounds of photos accumulating on their hard drives.

”The value may not be immediately apparent. But 10 years from now, nobody who’s geotagging their photos is going to regret it,” Mr. Butterfield said. ”Most people have just one or two or three iconic photos of their grandparents. Now people are going to have tens of thousands of photos, and when that happens, every little bit of context helps.”

Abstent from the discussion, however, are concerns over privacy, data-mining and the levels of surveillance enabled by these tools. My next project…