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How do you “accidentally post a photo”?





It's possible to accidentally post something, or have it swiped by many of the untrusted and untrustworthy applications on a PC or mobile device.

It's even easier to unintentionally include identifying information when intentionally making a post, whether by failing to catch it when submitting, or by including additional images in your online posting.

There are also wholesale uploads people may make automatically, e.g., when backing up content or transferring data between systems. That may end up unsecured or in someone else's hands.

Even very obscure elements may identify a very specific location. There's a story of how a woman's location was identified by the interior of her hotel room, I believe by the doorknobs. An art piece placed in a remote Utah location was geolocated based on elements of the geology, sun angle, and the like, within a few hours. The art piece is discussed in this NPR piece: <https://www.npr.org/2020/11/28/939629355/unraveling-the-myst...> (2020).

Geoguessing of its location: <https://web.archive.org/web/20201130222850/https://www.reddi...>

Wikipedia article: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_monolith>

These are questions which barely deserve answering, let alone asking, in this day and age.


I read the "accidentally" as applying to the "identifying" not the "post", although I agree the sentence structure would suggest "accidentally" as a modifier for "post" that makes a lot less sense.

A selfie with a snippet of building in the background might give away your location even if you think there's no way it could be locatable.

Did you somehow accidentally share a selfie?



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