Geotagging and Privacy

And if you don't, I'm so scared. Okay, all right, I give it away. Now. We're going to talk today about geo tagging and its relationship to privacy and how how geo tagging can be a really cool thing and can be a really neat way to interact with people online as well as to keep track of things that you've on, and also how sometimes it can be a bad thing, like you can give tools to people you may not want to associate with ways to harass you

and make your life miserable. Yeah, I'd like to uh to make it clear to we we bring these kinds of things up a lot, and we get criticized on occasion from people who seem to feel that we're unequivocally saying that these computerized tools are dangerous and scary and therefore you should turn off all technology. And that's that's not what we're saying. Um, like just about every technology we've ever mentioned on the podcast, not all of them, but the vast majority of them. Um, you can use

tools for all kinds of purposes. I mean, you could hit somebody in the head with a hammer, but it's really great for pounding in nails. Uh man, wait what I have been using the hammer in a very limited way. I shouldn't know that what's gonna happen? So bang, Thanks Maxwell, thank you. Um yeah, doesn't that beat all? Um, No, we're off to our rollicking stuff. No. Geo tagging is one of those things that that can be really really useful for all kinds of informational purposes. It can be

used for fun. Um. But if you give like you know, put your phone number up on on a billboard, and some people you like, we'll call, and other people you don't will, so so just be careful how you use that. And that's that's the essential message. But let's get into geo tagging and what it is and maybe you know and and great much greater detail will get into the privacy issue here. Sure. Yeah, so geo tagging is exactly what it sounds like. It is tagging some sort of

information with geographical a layer of geographical information. Yeah, we're we're talking about metadata here, and metadata is information about some information. Well yeah, information about information. That's usually how it's described. But um, you know you have a a book in front of you. Well, it's got a title. Um, you can talk about the publisher, You could talk about what kind of paper it was printed on. You can get into all kinds of information about how many pages

it has, how many words per page on average. But when we talk about geo tagging, you could geo tag a book. Heyes, you know it came from London. Look it says that right there on the page. It's on my shelf exactly. But yeah. You take a photo on your smartphone and it may include information from the GPS device that you have also in your smartphone. So you can say, go to the Grand Canyon and take photos of your your summer vacation, and you could say this

is specifically where this photo was shot. So if somebody, one of your friends. You post this on your photo sharing account on the web. When of your friends wants to go, oh, man, I'm going into the Grand Canyon this summer too. Where where did you take that picture? I want to see that for myself, we could say, well, these are the coordinates, So there you go, geo tagging. Yeah, there's actually a lot of different potential all applications for this.

There's the the fun vacation sort of version that you were talking about. For example, let's say that you go on a road trip and along the road trip, you take all these different photos and then you want to organize the photos into a online photo album, maybe even something that's more like an interactive scrapbook, and you want to go and create that. Well, there are programs that will allow you to do that, and they what they do is they read the meta data connected to those images.

So let's say that you're using a smartphone or you're using a digital camera that has a GPS receiver built into it, because there are some out there, not all of them, but there are some, and you take photos. What's cool is that most cameras, now almost all of them, will time stamp a photo yes, so it'll give you an exact date and time that that photo was taken. So as long as the cameras you know, clock is correct and calendar is correct, you're gonna have that information

included on the image. Then you have the additional information of the GPS UH coordinates, so you've got longitude and

latitude that gets thrown in there. With the right program, you could dump a ton of digital not really a ton because they don't wear anything, but you can throw up a lot of digital photos into that and have it arranged those photos by date and time and by location, so you could create an interactive map where someone could then go and look at how you went from on your vacation, like from following the photos, they can retrace your steps, see the sites you saw, and sort of

live your vacation just by going through these links. And you know, that's just a basic application of geotagging. There are a lot of other ones. I mean, there's there are tons of reasons to use it for marketing. I used an example recently when I was talking about this

on on a local news program. For example, let's see you have a food truck and let's say there's maybe four or five locations that you take this food truck to reag liarly throughout the week, and as a way of showing people where this is, you may take photos of your food truck so one they know what it looks like, but you include geotagging information and a and a a map application so it shows exactly where that truck is located when it's you know, when it's operating hours,

have it at that particular spot exactly, so then you've got a map that pops up. There are applications that incorporate this in such a seamless way that you really don't have to do anything other than make sure that GPS setting is turned on. Once you've done that, it does all the work for you. For example, twit pick does this if I take a photo with my my Android phone and I have the GPS feature turned on when I'm taking photos so it shares location data, and

I enable the location data on twit pick. So there are two spots where I have to agree to do this. Um, if I do both of those things and I take a photo using my camera and then upload it to twit pick, not only will it include that geographic location, it will actually pull up a Google Maps image and show where that photo was taken. And if you want, you can switch map from map view mode to satellite view mode and see a satellite picture of where you know,

where I was standing when I took that photo. We tried this on camera and it worked so well. We actually I took a photo from uh we have a balcony here at how stuff works in a nice deck really, um, that I stood out on and I took photos of and using the satellite you could see the exact location I stood where I took those photos, and it was, you know, a satellite photo of it, not just a map location. So that's kind of cool. You can use

that for all sorts of reasons. Um. But here's the thing about data, about data people, if people know how to access it, they can exploit it. Um. Yeah, it's it's a bad idea. Uh uh well okay, before ideeah, well yeah, I was gonna say this in a specific instance, but let me back up for just one second. You can there, Uh. Geo tagging is something that you know. Of course I knew about it. It's it's pretty common today,

especially for people with with smartphones. Um. But when I when I looked into it looking for a little history, as we were wont to do on this show. UM. I think the first mentions I saw when they were still people were still talking about it as though it were a new phenomenon. We're around two thousand seven, two eight, and that's when uh, consumer smartphones started becoming more popular.

The iPhone had come out in two thousand seven, and that really launched the smartphone craze, at least in the United States. Yeah, for consumers, of course, you know, UM and UH, of course there were the uh the memory cards used in digital cameras like the I Fi that well, even if you don't have a GPS enabled camera will store GPS information in the an images metadata UM, which is pretty cool because you don't have to have a GPS a camera would built in GPS to use that UM.

And I've read pretty good reviews of that. UM. So this is something coming on and now that we can do this UM, all sorts of other opportunities have sprung up. People use services like UM, like go Wala or four square. They want to tag where they are and not necessarily images. They'll say, you know, hey, I'm at the pub, you know, on the corner and come hang out if you're in the neighborhood exactly. UM. Twitter and Twitter is the same way,

and Facebook as well. They have there's Facebook places and there's also that you can turn location data on on Twitter if you want to. Yes, that's right, And that's exactly where I was going to go with this, UM, because you know you can you can say this. You can tell people on Twitter and Facebook and UM through images you shoot with your phone or your digital camera where you are, UM, and that can be great if

you want to share details about your vacation. Maybe you're on a business trip and you're somebody who likes to use social media to um point out how you're different from everybody else in your colleagues, and that's how you network with your colleagues and UM, it shows that you're really valuable in your field. Well, maybe you're on a business trip and you're taking photos and you're tagging everything and you're showing people your exact location, and then people

realize you're not home. And somebody who happens to know who you are, particularly who you are, and maybe they know where you live, they go way out. They're not home. So if I went to their house, maybe no one

is there, um, and that can be dangerous. And it's it's possible if you don't use your real name on on the social network and you're just taking photos, um, and you could you could take photos of your summer vacation and post them when you get home, and so you have your GEO tagged photos and you haven't revealed to everybody that you are out last week. It's like, well, I'm home now, so I went on a vacation to so and so. Here are the photos. Yea, And that's

that's great. But if you're if you're not careful and you post the wrong information, the right the exact right information at the wrong time, if you could clue people in that you're not home, or if you have people that might want to do you harm. I hope that's not the case, but yeah, if you have somebody that you've upset and they are following you and know exactly where you are, then they can come find you. That

could be a little nerve wracking. We can dive into this even a little deeper because there are there are very easy ways where people can find out where you live that some some of which would be under your control and some of which may not. For example, let's say that you've taken a photo of either your home or your inside your home. Maybe you're throwing a party and you're taking pictures of the party, and let's say

you've got the location data turned on there. Well, that metadata is going to be connected to those those images, and if you upload those images to certain uh photo albums, online photo albums, especially if you have it arranged that it's public uh, there's the possibility someone could then pull that image, look at the metadata and say, ah, this is where this person's houses. I did not know that before.

But because they've posted these pictures of an event that they weren't thinking about, like oh, this shows where my house is, they're thinking this was Bob's party as surprise party. It was great's a lot of fun. We took all these photos. That could be that could lead to be a problem. It could also be a problem if you if someone who's visiting you takes photos and then they upload it into some public online UH photo album and their metadata is turned on. In that case, it's not

even under your control. You're not the one who took the photos. But if they tag you in those photos, or they mentioned that they're at your house and that data is in that if that metadata connected to the photo,

someone could learn where you live. And this might not be a big deal for some of you may not think that that's a that scary a notion and and for most of it's probably not um but if you happen to do things like use Twitter or Facebook to post when you go on vacation, like you're saying, I'm leaving tonight, I'm so excited, Well, then that you've just given the clue that all right, I know where this person lives, I know they're not going to be home,

that this is the perfect opportunity to try and rob them. Now. Uh, you know, if you're careful about it and you don't share your your address, then there's less danger of that happening. If it does happen, you can pretty much narrow it down to the people who know you. And then you're thinking, well, there's gonna be a reckoning because I know it's one of you jerks, and I'm gonna narrow it down. But but yeah, like I said, with these these systems, it

can it can really come back and haunt you. It's kind of interesting too, also to see which services preserve the meta data and which ones strip it out. So, for example, twit pick, the meta data is preserved if you turn your location on in whatever device you're using to capture the photo, and you turn it on on twit pick. Now, granted, like I said, you have to choose to share it. Um so that's an opt in, which is good. We we like opt in, we don't

like opt out. You know, where you make the conscious choice to share the information as a default. Yes, if you if that's the if it's default, to opt into it, that's good. Um So if you so, let's say that you have all that you share it, that meta data will be preserved. What's interesting to me is one major place where people store photos that strips the meta data out, and I would have never guessed it is it Facebook.

It is if you upload an image that has meta data in it that that connects it to a location, and you upload it to your Facebook profile, and then someone were to go into that photo album, download the image and open it up in some sort of editor software to kind of see what the metadata is, they are not going to find location data in there. Interested strips it out. So Facebook actually does not support geo tagging right now as of the recording of this podcast.

Now could that change? It could and maybe that they incorporate pictures in their places. Uh. Feature in places, of course, is where you virtually check into locations capital places, yes, and and other people can check you into there as well.

You have to improve it, but other people, like let's say that you're at a restaurant and your friends are there, and your friends are on you know, going through the Facebook places to check in, they can check you in as well, but you have to approve it before it will pop up everywhere. Um, there may come a time where photographs are also supported by this feature. Right now they are not again as of the recording of this podcast. So that was interesting to me that Facebook does not

actually support geo tagging. Now you could still tell people where that was like if you wanted to. I mean, there's nothing stopping you from putting it in the caption. And there are also services out there that allow you to upload photos and then you put them on a map. Like you you you physically in input the address into the service, so it's not pulling from the meta data of the picture. It's requiring user input to geographically placed photos.

That's a little different. It still can come back and haunt you. Yeah. Yeah, Now, I mean another example of

something there. There have been a number of articles, uh in the media recently about geotagging and the possibility that it could lead to trouble if you're not careful, and one of those was, you know, if you have a lot of maybe you're taking you finally splurged and got that home entertainment system that you've always been wanting, and then you take photos of it and you know, share that in public with people, and you didn't turn off the geo tagging on your phone, and some random person

happens on it and goes, well, it is a really nice new entertainment system. I wonder if they're home during the week during normal business hours where most people are out working, and I have their exact location, so yeah, that that could be that could be hazardous. So yeah, I mean, there are so many things that you could use it for, uh, for good purposes, um, you know research, um, you know, personal research, geneal genealogical research. Um. You can

use it for geocashing purposes too. We had that that great podcast a long time ago. Now it seems like, um, but yeah, I mean they're there are games that you can play with geographical information. Um, you just have to be careful what you what you're sharing, and don't forget that there may be some kinds of information you do want to tag in some that you don't. Yeah, if you're making a travel guide for someone and you're giving them suggestions of where to go within a certain city,

geo tagging is a great tool. If you're using a website and interactive website to show people, Look, you know, just down the street from this one museum, is this really cool restaurant that, uh that I recommend because of blah blah blah. You know that sort of stuff. It comes in really handy. But yeah, there are other besides the whole burglary uh possibility. There's also the question of things like attracting the wrong sort of attention, like stalkers.

That's a very real concern, um, especially if you're using something like Twitter and you don't have a protected uh feed, Like if you if you have a public feed, that means every single thing you publish is going to be published on the public feed and theoretically anyone can see it. So let's say that you are, I don't know, a dashingly handsome co host of a technology podcast, and you take pictures of all your favorite places that you like

to go. And then some uh incredibly attractive young lady who has desires upon this bald, handsome co host of a technology podcast where to look at those photos and that meta data and say, hey, these are his favorite spots. All I have to do is go to one of these, and sooner or later he's going to show up, and then I can tell him how much I love him. Why has that not happened yet? I guess I haven't turned that GPS information on. That's the problem. I haven't,

dang it. You know, there's always something, but no, no, seriously, though, to be to be, I'm making light of it, but this is really a very serious situation, and that you know, you you need to be aware that the information you're sharing could, if you're not careful with it, be used by other people to to harass you, and uh, you know,

and that we don't want to see that happen. Now Again, we are not telling you don't use geotagging, just be aware of when you're using it, the situations you're using it in and the purpose you're using it. Um, Because again it could be a really fun way to share information about yourself, but you may not want to share everything. Yeah, yeah, I think that's a that's a good point. Um. It's just it's just one of those things where we're not saying no, don't ever do it. Just um, you know,

just think about it. And yeah, the odds someone will someone when someone will invariably right in and say, you know, you said geotagging was bad and I shouldn't do it, well, yeah, the odds are pretty slim that some of this is going to happen. Um, But you know, just think about it. It's just like, just like if you live in uh, you know, a pretty heavily um popular popularized area. Right.

Let's say like you live in a in a big city, right, you don't normally leave your car unlocked, or you'll leave your house or apartment unlocked, because even though the likelihood that you'll be targeted or for a home invasion or a car burglary is low, you don't go tempting fate. Same sort of thing, and again, you know their ties when you using geo tagging is perfectly fine. You just you may not want to use it all the time.

Like you're visiting your buddy and you're taking pictures, you might want to You might want to at least ask your friend, like should I turn GEO tagging off? Because otherwise people are gonna know exactly where this place is. Well, yeah, and that's funny because that you would say that, because I was thinking specifically of the rash of um break ins that has been happening in businesses here in Atlanta

over the past few months. A lot of there have been a lot of break ins and smallish businesses like strip malls, uh, from people who are breaking in to steal flat screen TVs off the walls, places that are that are offering TV for their customers in waiting rooms and things like that. Um. And you know, if you're taking a picture of some place while you're out, UM

what GEO tagging information? It's not necessarily your information, or you might be the business owner and people are you know, Hey, this is the cool place where I like to go on on Thursdays. You know everybody who's here we have trivia night or whatever. And uh, if you happen to tag that information and uh, it gets posted to the net. It could reveal information about your establishment with the kind of equipment that you have available, and it could inadvertently

make it known to uh, to thieves. So that's you know, of course, some businesses go ahead and advertise that you want to yeah, and I'm not saying that, Yeah, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to uh, I don't mean to intimate that that's the reason that that happened, but it could. It could give people clues. And again, if you're the business owner, then you're gonna say, hey, look, I've got

this great entertainment. You're gonna advertise that. You're not necessarily going to stop somebody from taking a photo of uh, their friends having a good time at this place, because they're gonna say, well, yeah, I want that will build bell, build word of mouth. You know, it's it's it's a tricky situation. I mean, it's one of those things where, uh, you know, you weren't you wouldn't necessarily think of it.

Even a few years ago. I wanted to kind of segue this into a discussion about privacy in the web in general, in the sense that I recently read an essay and then responded to it. The essay was Your Life torn? Open Sharing is a Trap written by Andrew Keene.

It was published on Wired dot co dot UK on February three eleven, and in it, Keen bemoans the fact that we are reaching a point where everyone is sharing lots of information about themselves, not just geotagging, but that is an element of it, but everything like you know, thoughts and uh and relationships, and that privacy is becoming

decreasingly important. So Keen's point was that this is going to mean that humanity itself will change, because privacy is part of being human, and if we are adicate privacy, then we're eradicating part of what it is to be human. H and I took Umbridge to a couple of his points, one of which was that I don't feel that that social networking necessarily means that you lose all your privacy because in most of these situations you have, First of all, you have the choice of whether or not to use

the social networking at all. Yes, and that is an important thing to note. It's not compulsory. Yeah, there's no there's no law that says you have to be on Twitter, Facebook, etcetera right. And second of all, you most of these services have levels of protection that you can choose to either initiate or turn off. For example, with the twit pick thing that I mentioned, you know, again you have to have the GPS location stuff turned on your smartphone or camera and you have to have it turned on

on twit pick for that to take effect. If it's not turned on on twit pick, that metadata will not be included. And so you don't you know, you have to choose to to share this information. So it's not like it's something where Big Brother has appeared and we're all four. He was making a lot of nineteen eight four references. And here's the thing is that in nineteen four, if you don't know that story into it's a government mandated society where people are under observation all the time

by a very oppressive, very invasive government. There's no choice there. But with with social networking there is. It's all choice. You can choose. You know, how much you share and how little you share. And uh, I also just don't think that it's going to lead to the downfall of mankind. So I had some some things to say about that, and if you want to read more, I wrote a blog post about and if you want to read keynes essay, I do recommend reading it. He makes some good points

things that I do not disagree with. I just felt that some of his central premises were a little faulty. Um. And the other element is the idea between using the internet to share this information versus using your memory to remember stuff. Because we've talked about that in the past. We talked about Nicholas cars famous article is Google making

as stupid? We did a whole episode about that. Um. The idea being that we are using computers and the cloud to store information that normally we would just store

in our own memories. Uh. Nicolas cars point was that he he felt he was losing This was very anecdotal, but he felt he was losing the ability to retain information that he couldn't even maintain focus on anything that took longer than a few minutes because the Internet had conditioned him, right, the web had conditioned him to accept information in in website like a web page sized amount and then that's it. You can't go more than that.

So he couldn't read a book anymore. Yeah, I think that's funny because that's that's one of the points that David Allen makes in his Getting Things Done is life can be very stressful if you have a lot of

things to manage. So writing things down or recording them in some fashion it doesn't necessarily had to be written, UM is as a good way to take the stress off because once you have it written down in a place where you're going to go back and look you, you're less likely to forget to do that thing, to accomplish that thing. And that's just one of the points he made. It's one of many points he makes in

the book. UM The important thing again to notice he suggests writing it down like on a paper planner is sort of where he started. He said, well, you know, if you have an electronic system that you prefer to use, but it's not the technology specific. It's not because we have Twitter and geotagging that we're giving away our privacy. It's what we're what we're doing with the technology as individuals and making our individual choices on what to do

with that technology, no matter. I mean, could write your location down on a piece of paper and yeah, you know, copy it five times and give it out to people, you wouldn't have the same reach as you would if you were doing this on the Internet, but you're still giving away important information about you. So yeah, I mean it's it's not the technology per se, it's what you're doing with it, and then what you're sharing with it.

It matters. And and I really find cars point interesting and the idea that he thinks it's it's a scary thing to be to lose that ability to retain information, you know, because we essentially feel like we've offloaded that off our brains so we can free up our brains. We don't need to remember stuff because it's somewhere else. For example, I used to be able to rattle off the phone numbers of all of my close friends and my family members, and now I'm able to remember about

four of them. Yes, because you have them in your smart exactly, They're all in my context list. I don't have to remember. I just go to the picture of the person, say, Hey, there's the dude I want to talk to, click on his picture, and there I go. Um, So, yeah, is something to his argument. What I thought was interesting is I read another point where this seems like, uh, it's almost the opposite. Take A fellow by the name of Kevin Slaven wrote an essay called the Ebb of Memory.

This was part of a book called This Will Change Everything's a series of essays from various experts in various fields, kind of giving their take on what will change everything. As a matter of fact, several copies have been floating around the Yes. So Slavens point was that it was, like I said, kind of the opposite. He said that human memory, the fact that human memory degrades over time

is a good thing. That that the typical person, they will experience something, they will remember it, and over time aspects of that memory will change. We will drop certain details, we may add certain things that did not happen into the memory, and we will misremember. I mean, this is why anecdotal evidence is not entirely uh, you know, reliable.

It's why when you bring witnesses in court cases, especially for something that happened years and years ago, the testimonial uh evidence is sometimes less reliable than any physical evidence you found, right, because we don't remember things exactly the way they happen necessarily uh. And he says this is a good thing because if something tragic happens in our lives, over time, we are able to distance ourselves. We forget

certain things. We don't feel that pain the same way when we think back as we did when it happened. There are people who have perfect memory, total recall, where they are able to remember every single thing that they've encountered with absolute clarity. And they explained they described their situation, their their their experiences as being just as raw as when it first happened. So the happiest moments of their lives, when they think on those moments, they experience those emotions

as if it had just happen. Same thing with the most tragic things. And Slaven's point is that that is that is really a tough life. It is hard to live that life where you can think back on the things that happened that maybe you're ashamed of, or maybe something that just hurt your feelings, and to experience that all over again, it's really hard to live with that. His point was that by offloading all this on the web,

we are preserving that information. All the information exists on computers or in the cloud, we can access it at any time. And then because information on computers and in the cloud does not change, it's not like computers forget things. We're going to see the details exactly as how we it we first put them in when we recorded them

the first time. And so Slaven's argument was that that this, this this sharing that we're doing, this disregard of privacy, will ultimately mean that we will live as if we have perfect memories, and that as a result, we will always be endanger of feeling the highest of highs and the lowest of lows because we are not giving our memory the chance to incorporate these things into our experience and then just uh and and and evolve over time.

So that's kind of fascinating too. And again it it relates back to geotagging, because we can now record the events of our lives on with a level of detail that is far beyond anything that anyone else has been able to do automatically, right, Like, I mean, you could have done it in the past, but it took more work. It took your work to do that. Yeah. Yeah, it's funny because one of the articles that I read in preparation, uh for the podcast was an older piece that Charlie

Sorrel did for Wired. I mean this was this was really before there were automated systems. I mean, I'm sure there were things that that you could do, but he was relying on the then new memory cards that had built in GPS system. UM. So he said, you know, basically that the the technology hadn't been made popular at that point to automatically geotag and send photos. UM. So

it's still sort of a new thing. And you know, you could use if you could sync up the date or the time actually the time on your GPS receiver and your your camera. If you have the timestamp, then it's you know, easy to sync up. As you were saying before, Um, you may not necessarily have the information stored. Uh, you may have to write it down, but at least

you had some sort of record of doing that. Um. You know, so there there were ways to do that even before it became a popular technology to build right in of course those of us with smartphones. UM. You know, I've been playing around with that since I got an Android found myself. UM and it's uh, you know, it's so much easier now to automatically do it. Um. And I think that that can be the problem if you're somebody who wants to do it sometimes but not other times.

If you just leave it enabled, you may inadvertently uh save information, or if you leave it off all the time, you may wish you had done it later, you know. Yeah, and we should point out that. You know, I talked to a lot about the services that automatically incorporate the meta data into them. You don't even if you aren't using a service that does that. If there, if the

metadata is there, it is possible to see it. It just means that the person who's looking at the photo has to open it in an application that will show that metadata. So a lot of photo editors do it. Even photo viewers in the more recent operating systems will

let you see that. If you have an older operating system, like I don't know people who are using certain computers for certain companies, um, you may not be able to see that metadata because the operating system came into being and the applications came into being before GPS metadata was included with photos popular, right, So you don't have that

X that I found that out. I went through all of the programs I have where I can manipulate photos, and I tried to see which ones would let me see the meta data that included GPS location, which ones don't. I have one program on this computer that lets me see meta data. Well, it's definitely, it's definitely becoming more popular.

Just about every editing software now. It's you know, designed for the consumer um and if you're using really high end stuff, well they may include it, but it's not necessarily something that you know, even things like Windows Picture Viewer and in the more recent operating systems you can find the meta data there and I Photo for the Mac with its know it's got features, right, So yeah, so yeah, if you have a newer machine, if you have like Windows seven or I believe even Windows Vista, UM,

you would be able to view this information pretty simply just by looking at the properties and looking for that that location data might be in longitude and latitude. But all you have to do there is copy and paste it into a program like just like Google Maps, and that'll that'll show you exactly where that location is. Yeah. So yeah, I mean it's a really interesting technology. It has a lot of legitimate uses, a lot of fun uses. Sure,

they're just just like any other tool. There are good ways to use it and bad ways to use it, and you should be aware of both before you just go out there and start clicking pictures of everything. Yeah, So that was a good discussion, and I apologize for getting very philosophical towards the end of it, but I just felt that that was one of those things that, you know, it's really interesting to me and I wanted to dive into it. And again, it's it's like anything else.

There are good points and bad points to to recording that information. Yep, yep, yep. So, if you guys have any stories you want to share or any thoughts about privacy and the web and what its role is. Do you think privacy is a thing of the past. Do you think we're actually going to get to a point where we will all, either by choice or perhaps by force, no longer have privacy? Let's know. You can let's know on Twitter and Facebook the handle there is tech Stuff

hs W, or you can shoot us an email. That address is tech stuff at how stuffworks dot com and Chris and I will talk to you again soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our homepage. The How Stuff Works iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes. Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you