Zooming in: A stalker's geolocation shortcut
It's not just the big details in your photos, it's the tiny ones that are also important. Think before you post!
The day before the election, I asked my followers to geolocate the following picture:
As always, there was a double purpose in doing this geolocation challenge. Everyone can have a bit of fun stalking me across the globe AND we all might learn something new about online safety.
I was born in Ukraine, and write about my native motherland frequently, therefore, many of my followers were familiar with the big building looming in the background:
Yep, that’s Kyiv’s famous Besarabsky Market behind me. It is also affectionately referred to as Besarabka.
Of course, if you’ve never spent oodles of money on cheese there before, you still had other options for geolocating me. Here is a very efficient one by LuÃs, just to give one example:
If you really wanted to go on a detective journey, on the other hand, Ken has you covered:
Yep, in case you missed it, here’s the Cyrillic letter on the sandwich board, also picked up on by the likes of Dan Perkins, for example:
Ken’s methodology is particularly important, because he keeps bringing it back to the fact that he knows his subject, i.e. me:
This is something that I tell everyone who takes an online safety class with me — think of a creepy stalker as a student, and the major is you. Stalkers look at the big picture. If someone wants to find you, they will narrow their possibilities down exactly like Ken has. If they hit a dead end, they’ll go back and re-trace their steps.
They won’t need to be familiar with a particular cityscape to do it quickly either. A single letter from a particular alphabet will speed up the process.
Having been stalked before, this is just one reason why I don’t post pictures from an event until AFTER I’ve left. This particular picture was taken on my birthday, outside of what used to be the famous Budu Pozzhe bar (great cocktails — RIP). At that time in my life, I didn’t much care about the timing of my pictures. I’m much more proactive about that now, and you know what, that’s not paranoia talking. That’s just life experience!
I’m not telling you to cower under a blanket for the rest of your life and never have fun on social media (what’s the point of wearing a cool wolf necklace if you can’t share it with the world?) — what I am telling you is that you should always be aware of what kind of information you are potentially giving away.
Finally, this exercise also taught me that Google doesn’t think much about my choices in fashion:
Wow, Google. Thanks.
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