Paul V's blog

I went down to HOPE in New York to give a talk called “Geo-tagging: Opting in to Total Surveillance.” The title is a bit over the top, but that’s what hacker cons are all about. I gave an overview of my thesis project (working title Twitterography) and I explained the sort of data mining that is possible with geotags. I’m not all doom and gloom though: I talk about about some of the benefits. For example, during the recent Toronto G20 meeting, Twitter was the go-to source for live information and geotags were a powerful tool for visualizing what was going on. The important thing to remember is that:

One geotag is anecdote; many geotags are data.

This data can be used for nefarious purposes (to figure out where you are at 6pm and rob you) or for beneficial purposes (to figure out how bad traffic is in your neighbourhood). Get the slides here and give them a read, or download a torrent of a video of the talk. There’s a good post on Forbes covering it as well, give it a read. Excerpt:

Vet analyzed thousands of geotagged tweets and used a “clustering” algorithm to group them into geographic zones. Then he used words like “couch,” “home,” “TV,”  “dog” to determine which of those clusters is likely the user’s home. Other word clues helped him make educated guesses at his or her workplace.

Paul "640k" Geotagging geotagging, surveillance