An article from the Toronto Star caught my attention it features the website I Know Where Your Cat Lives. Owen Mundy, an associate professor in digital media art at Florida State University, developed the website in an effort to highlight potential privacy concerns related to the use of public websites. Mundy collected one million cat photos with geographic data embedded from public photo sharing sites (e.g. Instagram, Flickr) and placed the photos on a world map. The motivation behind the project came about when Mundy realized that photos of his young daughter had been posted online with embedded geographic co-ordinates pinpointing the location of his backyard. He then thought “What’s the closest thing people have to them that they photograph that’s like a child, but not as scary as mapping someone’s child? That’s a cat.” Mundy’s web project is meant to illustrate the substantial amount of personal data individuals share, often unwittingly, when they post photos on social media sites.

Link to Toronto Star Article:

m.thestar.com/#/article/life/2014/08/01/how_curiosity_killed_your_cats_privacy.html