Cat-tracking website uses metadata to troll public on privacy matters

Somewhere in bowels in the World Wide Web lurks a website with the absurd name of “I Know Where Your Cat Lives” that plots the location of cats based on metadata and images obtained from public image hosting websites. The site isn’t actually about cat-stalking, as much as it may seem like it, but rather an experiment to demonstrate the transparency of personal information on the Internet.

Project founder and associate professor at Florida State University, Owen Mundy, writes “The project explores two uses of the internet: the sociable and humorous appreciation of domesticated felines, and the status quo of personal data usage by startups and international megacorps who are riding the wave of decreased privacy for all.” He explains that a total of one million cat images are strewn across the globe using locational metadata contained in the image, revealing where the cat owners may have been within a 25-foot range. 

Mundy and his assistant obtained the images easily enough from Flickr, Twitpic, Instragram, and “some other imaging sharing sites,” before inserting the data into an algorithm to autonomously map it. Users visiting Mundy’s web page will be treated to a view of Google Earth littered with cat images. The information can be sorted into charts to view cat distribution by continent, country, province/state or even city. 

Here’s an interesting statistic: America has 236,040 cats, or more than any other nation (taking into consideration that only one million images were used). Similarly, New York City has the highest cat population by city in the world.

California hosts more cats than any state in the United States.

It’s fair to assume that if regional coordinates are embedded within the metadata, then there’s a high probability that so is username, e-mail, or IP address. It doesn’t more than a bit of Internet sleuthing to pull up a name on top of this. Mundy advises all unhappy users that they can take down their cat-pics by simply changing the privacy settings on the account associated with the image-hosting site.

All the known-cats located around the Electronic Products' office

Via Wired/Iknowwhereyourcatlives.com