Friday, July 25, 2014

What Cats Can Teach You About Personal Privacy

Ever posted a picture of your cat online?

Unless your privacy settings avoid making APIs publicly available on sites like Flickr, Twitpic, Instagram or the like, there's a cat stalker who knows where your liddl' puddin' lives, and he's totally pwned your pussy by geolocating it. 


Mundy, a data analyst, artist, and Associate Professor in the Department of Art at Florida State University, has been working on the data visualization project, which is called I Know Where Your Cat Lives.

It's a data experiment that takes advantage of a furry monolith: some 15 million images currently tagged with the word "cat" on public image hosting sites, with more being uploaded at a rate of thousands more per day.

Mundy isn't even particularly a cat person. He could just have easily called the project "I know where your kid sleeps". Creepy? Oh yeah - much worse than kitty-stalking creepy. That is, of course, the point of the project... (more) (The Map)



Tip: Go tighten up your privacy settings. Better yet, turn off geo-location when taking photos. Ultimate better, stop posting.