Twitter users may be giving away more about their location than they realise.
Two new websites, GeoSocial Footprint and
Ready or Not, aim to solve this awareness problem by letting users see the location data they are broadcasting to the world when they tweet.
Users who haven't enabled geotagging can rest easy, but for that small percentage who include their location with their tweets, the website shows how shockingly straightforward it is to estimate a person's place of work and home.
Both websites allow you to type in any Twitter handle and find location data associated with that account.
Geosocialfootprint.com makes estimates about place of work -- very accurate estimates in the case of this author -- and gives each user a risk rating, along with suggestions for reducing your "geosocial footprint". Unsurprisingly, that advice largely consists of, disable geotagging.
The site is accompanied by a study from the University of Southern California, in which researchers sampled 15 million tweets and found that 20 percent of tweets gave away their author's location, down to the street.
The majority of this location data was due to geotagging, which is somewhat surprising given that others have previously only found
a tiny percentage of tweets to be geotagged.
The more stylish Ready or Not website, from University of California, Berkeley also allows you to search Instagram posts and lets you filter tweets by time, so you can see where and when users are tweeting.
Most people will find that these sites are unable to pull up any information about them. For their clueless geotagging friends -- I plead guilty as charged -- it will be a wakeup call.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
