Like me, you may have taken a number of photos this summer charting your travels. You may even have uploaded them to Facebook or a photo sharing site like Picassa or Flickr. Some of you probably use smart phones which allow you to post updates to your friends and family seamlessly, and in real time. And it is incredible (‘a picture is worth a thousand words’) uploading a shot of you sitting in some bar in _____ (complete the gap) to Twitter via Twitpic lets everyone know in seconds how amazing an experience you’re having.

What you may not realise as you click and send on these smart phones is that encoded with that photo is specific data not only about the camera used, whether with flash or without, the lense, etc. but also the longitude and lattitude indicating where the picture was taken. This location based data is stored thanks to geo-tagging. Now most digital cameras don’t automatically geo-tag photos. But smart phones do. It’s their default, meaning that its shipped like that. In order to turn it off you have to read the manual and change some settings. We shouldn’t under-estimate the default settings of any gizmo we buy or website we visit and contribute to: it directly effects what the majority do and can make or break the company introducing it.

With that bit of background you might want to pop over to ICanStaulkU which uses that data to plot very precisely where a person is who’s uploaded a photo and tweeted it to their followers on Twitter. It may sound a bit creepy, but in fact, the site has been set up to raise awareness about the power of the default and the ways in which such data can be used. So, a quick example:

Here’s the tweet collected on the I CanStaulkU Twitter feed.

That message has been generated from chrispople’s Twitter account

When he uploaded this photo onto yfrog

Most interesting though is the way that the geo-positioning from that photo has been instantly loaded onto a Google map giving his precise location.

Now although I’m showing the different elements here on a blog post by capturing the screen I’m looking at, if I use this on my smart phone then that access is in real time. I can know where chrispople is seconds after he uploads his photo.

You might not think this is a big deal. In fact, it’s becoming increasingly fashionable to disclose location information as we physically surf the city.  Services such as Foursquare, Gowalla, and now Facebook Places are capturing the market for the fashion thereby linking the online social network to the offline, physical meeting up of friends or even friends of friends. That same information is also being harnessed by groups monitoring abuses in civil and human rights and is one way in which new communications technologies (particularly mobile phones) are being used to hold governments to account.

But to disclose such information accidentally, now that’s another question … isn’t it?