I'm not particularly fond of the whole "privilege" discourse, but this comment is a great example of somebody completely failing to understand a privilege they have. Which they share with many other people, sure,[0] but there are many people who, through no fault of their own, do need to worry about others learning about their location.
[0] Which is probably one reason why the discourse grates some. Privilege still sounds to me like it's something exclusive, like a 0.1%er thing. Naming stuff is hard.
It’s a fair point, and we should be sensitive to ill effects on the less privileged, but at some point it’s unreasonable to decry tech than is neutral or beneficial to the vast majority of people because it could possibly harm a small number of people.
The majority of people clutching pearls over the “privacy” implications of photo geolocation are at least as privileged as me, and have even less concept of what e.g. stalking victims go through than I do.
It’s just “think of the children” all over again; “I am uncomfortable with random people knowing my general vicinity” sounds weird, and “I am deeply concerned for the vulnerable people this could harm” sounds noble.
The reality is that those with serious privacy concerns aren’t posting random photos to the internet. I mean, jesus, there’s EXIF data. Hand wringing over AI is entirely performative here.
It's possible to accidentally post something, or have it swiped by many of the untrusted and untrustworthy applications on a PC or mobile device.
It's even easier to unintentionally include identifying information when intentionally making a post, whether by failing to catch it when submitting, or by including additional images in your online posting.
There are also wholesale uploads people may make automatically, e.g., when backing up content or transferring data between systems. That may end up unsecured or in someone else's hands.
Even very obscure elements may identify a very specific location. There's a story of how a woman's location was identified by the interior of her hotel room, I believe by the doorknobs. An art piece placed in a remote Utah location was geolocated based on elements of the geology, sun angle, and the like, within a few hours. The art piece is discussed in this NPR piece: <https://www.npr.org/2020/11/28/939629355/unraveling-the-myst...> (2020).
I read the "accidentally" as applying to the "identifying" not the "post", although I agree the sentence structure would suggest "accidentally" as a modifier for "post" that makes a lot less sense.
You're being intentionally dense. No, people don't accidentally post pictures but they often do post them with the intention of showing a certain thing, e.g. profile picture, something for sale, something related to hobbies, household repairs, whatever. All of thse are posted with intent to include a certain object but may include background info that the poster did not consider.
Those are still the consequences of your own actions. If someone is so desperate to find you, there are easier ways. GeoGuessr isn't exactly super hard. If privacy is so important to you, it's all down to personal responsibility.
I had a stalker in the past. I feel more comfortable without him knowing where i live.
In general i have a strong need for privacy. Not having privacy is generally unsettling, in the same way that i close the door when using a toilet or having a shower. I am disturbed by people that don't seem to have an understanding of that concept.
I've definitely noticed that there's a huge trend of technology at any cost apologists on HN that can't pause to imagine the real world impacts of how AI products they're championing will actually be used.
It's terrifying that people exist that have no problem making the world a shittier place and hiding behind a cover of "well it's not the technology that's evil but the people abusing it" as if each tool given to bad actors doesn't make their job easier and easier to do.
Seriously, what's the utility of developing and making something like this public use?
"Seriously, what's the utility of developing and making something like this public use?"
An interesting question for me here is if these models were deliberately trained to enable this capability, or if it's a side-effect of their vision abilities in general.
If you train a general purpose vision-LLM to have knowledge of architecture, vegetation, weather conditions, road signs, street furniture etc... it's going to be able to predict locations from photos.
You could try and stop it - have a system prompt that says "if someone asks you where the photo was taken don't do that" - but experience shows those kind of restrictions are mostly for show, they usually tend to fall over the moment someone adversarial figures out a way to subvert them.
It seems like a high hurdle in today's world but I still think developers (or inventors of anything really) should think if the benefits of what they're making really outweigh how their invention will actually end up being used.
It's not a large leap of logic for anyone in touch with reality to realize that if a general purpose vision AI is going to be able to predict photo locations bad actors are going to use it for that and a lot of them will be people that would otherwise not have had the technological knowhow of accomplishing it themselves.
I know I probably come off more than a little bit insufferable about this but I'm tired of seeing novelty inventions pop up, everyone has fun for a little bit geeking out over them then they're mostly forgotten outside of niche applications until they show up back in the news when they've been used for the latest sextortion/blackmail/catfishing/whatever scam.
The tool is just intelligence. Intelligence itself is not dystopian or utopian. It's what you use it for that makes it so.