A website that tracks and shows the locations of cats through pictures posted on the Internet is revealing online privacy issues.
Owen Mundy, an assistant professor of art at Florida State University, used cat pictures and a supercomputer to build the "I Know Where Your Cat Lives" website, which pinpoints the locations of the cats found in the pictures.
The issue, however, lies in the fact that as the website traces the location of the cat, then the location of the cat's owner is revealed as well.
According to a post on his blog, Mundy said that he created the "I Know Where Your Cat Lives" website to explore two ways to use the Internet, with the first usage being for the appreciation of feline friends from all over the world.
The second usage being explored, on the other hand, is the status quo of startup companies and international corporations using the personal data of consumers as online privacy continues to decrease.
The website, according to Mundy, is a project that uses public pictures of 1 million cats, visualizing their locations on a world map. The cats were located by using the embedded longitude and latitude coordinates that are found in the metadata of pictures.
The pictures used for the experiment, available to the public through popular picture-share websites, were processed using a supercomputer to determine the locations of the cats.
"Welcome to today's internet — you can buy anything, every website is tracking your every move, and anywhere you look you find videos and images of cats," Mundy writes, adding that there are currently 15 million pictures on public photo hosting websites that have the "cat" keyword tag, with thousands being uploaded every day from all over the world.
Many of the new camera models, including cameras found in smartphones, attach metadata that includes coordinates to each picture taken.
Cat owners that feel their privacy being violated by having pictures of their cats posted in the website can choose to have the images taken down.
"The way you would go about doing so is by increasing the privacy settings of the photos of your furry feline friends. Then within 30 days your photos will be gone from our site," the website states.
The practice of increasing privacy settings for pictures should then be applied by people on all their other shared pictures, which will increase security for the individuals and their loved ones.
