Does anyone here remember those huge catalogs of everyone's home address? I recall they were full of yellow and white pages.<p>I'm not sure what the point is here...if someone knows your name they can often simply look up your home address online (or in an anachronism).<p>Even <i>social security numbers</i> are available online for people who have died: <a href="http://ssdmf.info/" rel="nofollow">http://ssdmf.info/</a><p>I can sympathize with the idea that people should be able to live private lives, but what Instagram is doing doesn't seem particularly notable.
I've got a friend who works as a correctional officer in a German "open prison". When the inmates leave for home on weekends some of them are forbidden from consuming alcohol, drugs, contact certain people, visit certain areas.<p>According to my friend the most effective tool to check up on those inmates is Facebook. Quite a few of them just can't resist to post drunk party pictures, brag about stuff they shouldn't be doing, etc.<p>Another way they use Facebook is to detect if someone's using a mobile phone - which are forbidden on the compound: Simply check the inmates' profiles and see which inmates who are not on leave are online.<p>There's that quote that says that Facebook made possible what KGB, Stasi and the likes couldn't ever dream to achieve. So yeah ...
So Instagram geotags photos when the user agrees to enable geotagging. And photos on public feeds are public.<p>I'm not seeing how this is unexpected or newsworthy. It just sounds like there are folks out there who don't consider their location to be a secret. Folks who do are able to communicate that by denying the geotagging permission.
I think geotagging, like other image metadata, is far less obvious to the general public than it should be because the location information isn't directly visible most of the time; maybe if cameras that geotagged photos showed their GPS coordinates in the same way that timestamps are shown, people would get the idea.<p>It's funny how many people will think you're a "hacker" and be very shocked if you reply to a geotagged photo they casually sent with a map pointing to exactly where it was taken. :-)
This is actually a pretty rudimentary use of Instagram's location features. On Friday I am releasing a site where you can monitor specific physical addresses for Instagram posts and get alerts in realtime - regardless of who posts them. Right now I am working on some pre-built feeds for celebrity homes (see inside celebrity holiday parties etc), major concerts and sports events, and news events (protests in New York etc).<p>Because Instagram geotags by default, it poses some really interesting privacy challenges and tradeoffs. If you are privacy sensitive, shutoff Instagram's access to your location.
It should be noted that it's <i>extremely</i> easy to scrape geotag information or any public hashtag feed via the Instagram API.<p><a href="http://instagram.com/developer/" rel="nofollow">http://instagram.com/developer/</a><p>EDIT: Here's a very quick map of all the #tree tweets on Instagram in the past hour or so: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/D66r3Ui.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/D66r3Ui.png</a>
This site pairs geotagged photos with Google Street View. It's heartwarmingly creepy. By default, right now it's following #christmas, but here's the view of #tree:<p><a href="http://sm.rutgers.edu/thebeat/?q=tree" rel="nofollow">http://sm.rutgers.edu/thebeat/?q=tree</a>