Laugh. Learn. Love cats.
Newton: I want to personally issue an apology to all of you who were creeped out by yesterday’s post. As spokescat, it’s my job to make sure that this is a fun place to visit, and you see what happens when you let a human anywhere near the computer unsupervised.
The problem is that I’m a cat, and I have to sleep eighteen hours a day. That’s a long time for me to leave her unsupervised.
Do you think I need to lock her in the bathroom while I snooze? Or shut off the cable modem again?
Have you ever wondered about the kitties that live in the houses around yours? Now you can catch a glimpse of them online.
Associate professor of art at Florida State University, Owen Mundy, realized that instagram was creating a map with every picture he was sharing with the world, and he thought he would show how this worked in the least creepy way possible: with cat photos. The result is a site he named I Know Where Your Cat Lives, and it shows the geolocation of one million photos tagged with the word “cat” that were found on Flickr, Twitpic, Instagram, and other public image hosting sites. A supercomputer at Florida State University helped crunch the data, and the result is a Google Maps representation of the cat photos they found — minus the usernames from the accounts that originally uploaded them.
The result lets you see kitty photos that were taken near your home — or near any other address you can think of.
How do they know where your cat lives? Well, they don’t actually know where she lives. They know where the photo was taken, if the camera or smartphone that took the photo included it in the EXIF data stored with the photo. Photos can have lots of handy information stored in the EXIF data with the image itself, including things like the F-stop and ISO speed used to take the image, as well as geotagging information.
What can you do if you’re creeped out by finding out there is image data inside photos you take?
If you want to remove geotags from images that are downloaded to your computer, Windows users can delete the data through the Properties window for the image file, while there are programs to help Mac users. Lifehacker has handy instructions on how to remove personal information from photographs.
Phone users can check their respective app stores to be able to see and selectively delete geolocation data in photos that are on the device, and of course, you can turn of the recording of the data to begin with in your phone’s preferences. Similarly, cameras that include the feature allow you to turn it off, if you choose.
In the meantime, the Random Cat button on the site is nearly as addictive as kibble. A chance to view random cats all around the internet and learn a little bit about the data stored with your photos helps us all get something useful — or at least fun — out of this project.
