On Everybody's Radar

Mathew Honan spends some logging his whereabouts to every geo-aware service he can muster up. At one point, to determine how much privacy he might be giving up, he tries a little experiment:

On a sunny Saturday, I spotted a woman in Golden Gate Park taking a photo with a 3G iPhone. Because iPhones embed geodata into photos that users upload to Flickr or Picasa, iPhone shots can be automatically placed on a map. At home I searched the Flickr map, and score—a shot from today. I clicked through to the user’s photostream and determined it was the woman I had seen earlier. After adjusting the settings so that only her shots appeared on the map, I saw a cluster of images in one location. Clicking on them revealed photos of an apartment interior—a bedroom, a kitchen, a filthy living room. Now I know where she lives.

The article also uses the phrase “anonymous geoshagging,” if that piques your interest.