iknowwhereyourcatlives.com only scratches the surface of online privacy. Replace those harmless images of cats with yourself, your parents, your kids, new bling, new toys, etc. For a wannabe criminal it becomes very easy to determine your lifestyle, material possessions, the locations of items in your house & the address of where those items are.
The website highlights the risk we all face when sharing photos with ‘friends’. Information stored within photos taken on mobile phones & GPS-enabled cameras contain location information which can be extracted and used in Google Maps to pinpoint your location.
Owen Mundy’s interest lies in ‘public space and its relationship to data’.
iknowwhereyourcatlives.com” is a data experiment that visualizes a sample of 1 million public pics of cats on a world map, locating them by the latitude and longitude coordinates embedded in their metadata. The cats were accessed via publicly available APIs provided by popular photo sharing websites. The photos were then run through various clustering algorithms using a supercomputer at Florida State University in order to represent the enormity of the data source.”
If that didn’t scare you enough there are also risks associated with disposing your mobile phones or computer equipment. Formatting & performing factory resets isn’t enough.
Please note that social media sites vary in what metadata is retained when you upload photos. You’ll need to refer to their policies and check their privacy settings to remove/strip storing of this information.
We highly recommend targeting the source of the data. Look within the settings of your mobile phone’s Camera App you should be able to find an option to ‘disable location access’ or ‘disable location tagging’.
For those photos stored on laptops and USB hard drives, there are a couple of simple (and free) ways to remove metadata from your photos.
For nearly 15 years Shred-X has been the leader in secure destruction services. We assist organisations in complying with the Privacy Act 1988 and its Amendments providing customised services to thousands of government agencies, business and households across Australia.
In addition to destroying documents, Shred-X also provide a full suite of e-waste destruction and recycling services.