What a random truck stop photo can teach you about safety
This is a fun and slightly scary experiment
The day after Christmas, I was on the road. I posted the following picture on my Twitter:
The location was decidedly unglamorous, and, as you’ll note if you look in the original photo, I had cropped the image in a certain way:
I wanted to see how many people would immediately recognize what was going on on top of the shack above me, and how many would have trouble.
I had also run the cropped image through Google Lens several times, and was fairly confident that it wouldn’t recognize this version (although, as we’ve seen before, results may differ for different users). I also showed the image to some friends, who didn’t immediately recognize the shed behind me.
Predictably, someone found my exact location within minutes (yes, MINUTES, if you are just joining me) of me posting the original tweet:
Congratulations to Lucy! Just two minutes in, she had zeroed in on me.
Lucy’s method involved instant recognition. She immediately saw that in spite of his cut off nose, Snoopy was on top of the shack!
Afterward, all she had to do was google “Snoopy shed” (she corrected her original tweet on the method she used). The truck stop near Dunn is a popular location for taking photos, and there’s a decent diner and even a gift shop nearby. Voila:
At that point, all Lucy needed was to match the building in the background to what was happening in the foreground, just as wssnr did here:
The circled building above is the shed, in front of which I am standing. Behind me is the diner + gift shop.
HOWEVER, we must understand that human beings process visual information differently. For example, Melissa was another person who quickly saw Snoopy in the cropped image:
However, ClawShrimp did not:
It’s very important for us to discuss how we process images. Why? Because it impacts our personal safety.
Imagine if I had cropped the image while seeing it through ClawShrimp’s eyes. I may have thought to myself, “This is safety to post publicly, no one will find this location.”
If you’ve ever been stalked, or know someone who has, you know exactly where I’m going with this. Cropping images can give you a false sense of security about what you post publicly online.
This is especially important for people in sensitive jobs and those of us who’d like to enjoy at least a minimal degree of anonymity online. So many of us think we can’t be tracked down — when in fact, all it takes is one person able to zero in on a crucial detail.
This is why I want to encourage you to share my post with anyone who may benefit from it.
No complicated methods were involved here. It was literally just going from seeing Snoopy to using Google. Plenty of other people can do it, even if you feel that you cannot.
Getting on the road in the middle of a raging pandemic was a bit scary for me, but life made it necessary. I also really wanted to do a geolocation challenge in my home state, North Carolina. I spent some of my happiest years there, and being back always makes me think about dad, and how we used to take road trips when he was younger. An immigrant, he loved stopping by roadside diners, learning the history of obscure places, and listening to people talk over big plates of cheesy grits. It was in seemingly random moments like these that I saw his face light up with happiness, as he felt at home in his new country.
I have many more places connected to dad that I’d like to explore, and with your support, we can do it together.
Stay with me!
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