…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…

It’s a convenient way to stalk learn more about your favorite Flickr user, all in one place.
[via Lifehacker]

Ryan Singel points Tonu Samuel’s demonstration of some cameras that also embed a small thumbnail image of the original photo that can survive subsequent tinkering and cropping – allowing a before-and-after comparison. He’s written a web crawler that’s collecting images with hidden thumbnails, and displaying both the final image and the uncensored thumbnail on his website.

Most of the comparisons are just minor cropping or tweaking for aesthetics, but some reveal the faces of, um, boudoir photographs that had been obscured when originally posted to the web. Some, like the samples here, zoom in on one subject, losing the context of the full situation: is he looking smug as she laughs hysterically, or is she crying? Or is she covering her face because she doesn’t want it to be known she was with him at that particular moment?
Its not too hard to imagine the growing wave of MySpace & Facebook forensic investigations taking advantage of this kind of meta data hidden within the photos posted to the web.

My wife doesn’t want to have to carry around two bulky devices and greatly extend the already considerable time it takes her to get photos online by manually tagging photos with lat-long, she just wants to be able to find all the 2004 photos of the kids in New Zealand in one quick search.

Yep, that is a cool benefit of having locational data automatically attached to the photos that we post and share online. Of course, this also allows the following to occur:

• Law enforcement can search for all photos online matching the GPS coordinates & timing of a certain political rally, greatly broadening their ability to keep records of who was present.
• Combined with the increasing use of facial recognition technologies with shared online photos, stalkers (or other annoying folks) can search for a certain person’s face, and determine the GPS coordinates of the coffee shop they seem to be pictured in every Tuesday morning.

You get the idea….

My concern with such a finding is that if the makers and users of facial recognition systems see a value in having multiple pictures of me in their databases, then a new market might emerge for the collection and aggregation of my likeness.

In some cases, this might not be problematic. For example, if NYU wanted to use facial recognition systems to regulate who can enter the library, they could take 10 photos of me (from various angles, with various lighting conditions) when I have my official photo taken for my NYU identification card. I would likely allow this presuming that its purpose is to reduce false negatives when I try to enter the library.

But, what if the Times Square Business District or other places that rely on facial recognition for identification purposes (rather than NYU’s verification) want to have multiple images of people in their databases? The likely methods to get these images would seem to be (a) see if government agencies will provide images (the DMV, for example), (b) solicit images from other bodies who have my photo on file (NYU, my employer, my health club), (c) crawl the web for my image (from my website, my Friendster page, my Flickr account, or (d) rely on commerical data aggregation companies to do this for them.

Consider that last example. The need for a wide array of personal and transactional data about individuals has led to companies like Choicepoint to aggregate large amounts of public (and non-public) information about people. They mine through databases, web pages, and even send workers to government file rooms to digitize public records to capture information for their vast databases. Now imagine if there was a market for my image data as well as my transactional data. Would Choicepoint send workers to digitize yearbook photos? Aggregate still images from surveillance camera footage (Citibank has pictures of me every time I use their ATM machine with my debit card)? Systematically scrape the web for my likeness?

The idea that images of me could become part of the vast commercial data aggregation efforts currently underway is not something I have considered (nor had Phillips) – and its something I’m not particularly comfortable with either.