What Geotagging on Twitter Really Means
Geotagging: Adding Geographical information (Latitude and Longitude Coordinates) data to something. In this article, specifically to tweets. That means, that if you’re at the coffee shop, and tweet from there, those GPS coordinates are attached to the message you posted. Still don’t get it, check out Twitter’s Explanation of: What is Geotagging?.
Geotagging your Tweets
This is certainly an interesting feature, but I find that for the uninformed user, this is incredibly dangerous and they might not even know they should be weary.
Why You Should Be Weary
Sharing information, and finding people near you is great if you have the right intentions but some people out there are wack jobs and others are just smart enough to use the information to rob you. Here is the video explaining this robbery:
This happened WITHOUT geotagging. However, now that geotagging has come along, someone could tell that you are not at home by looking at the location of your tweet, no matter what you are saying. Granted, this is an opt-in service, but people still try the latest and greatest just for a “why not”. Here is a picture of the Twitter settings that allow you to turn on Geotagging:
Notice there is a button to “Delete all location data”. I don’t remember seeing this before, but I have a feeling if it wasn’t there, it would heavily requested by people who get freaked out about what geotagging really means.
Microsoft’s Bing Maps now supports searching for geotagged tweets in a given area and is quite neat. I wrote some test code today and ran it on one of the users that came up. It showed me that they tweeted at what looked like home, and at school, and both of those tweets had timestamps. With this sort of information, trends about how a person spends their day could be developed, and more robberies like the one mentioned above could happen.
Who would want to use Geotagging for their personal tweets? Are you worried?