I know where your Kitty lives

I love cats and would gladly live in a house with twenty, okay maybe thirty cats, my #computer and great internet. I would make one of those great cat rooms that you see on the internet and post countless pictures of my cats to #socialmedia. I think to complete my life as a cat woman I would monopolise the #cats on the various platforms and we would all live happily ever after. Oh, I did forget to add that I do #osint (Open-Source Intelligence Investigations)?investigations and I have found that during these investigations even some of the baddies like #cats .

In today’s digital world you can buy anything, every website tracks your every move, and there are videos and images of cats everywhere you look.

So, imagine how delighted I was to come across a website called ?I Know Where Your Cat Lives. iknowwhereyourcatlives.com is a data visualisation experiment that uses metadata-embedded latitude and longitude coordinates to locate a sample of one million public images of cats on a world map.[2]

According to #IKWYCL there are currently 15 million images tagged with the word "cat" on #public #image hosting sites, and thousands more are uploaded daily from all over the world.[1]

The cats were accessed using APIs made publicly available by popular photo sharing websites. To represent the enormity of the data source, the photos were then run through various clustering algorithms on a supercomputer.[3]

This project investigates two uses of the internet: one that promotes sharing for the sociable and humorous appreciation of domesticated felines, and another in which start-ups and international mega-corporations exploit the status quo of personal data usage, riding the wave of decreased privacy for all. I Know Where Your Cat Lives does not depict all cats on the internet, but rather those that have allowed this website team to track where their owners have been.[4]

The question is why am I writing about this topic, it would be appear an easy answer. I clearly love cats, looking at cats and admiring random cats on websites and social platforms. However with all this kitty data freely available it rings alarm bells for me. This is where I gently remind you that you need to constantly review the data you share and double check those privacy settings.

There is no harm in posting pictures of your #kitty online but as an OSINT investigator it would be easy for me to find out where you live and a bit of information about you, like where you live, what you like to do, what you like eat and what your hobbies are, and of course how pretty your kitty is.

So to end off my kitty post I guess I am asking what are your purrvacy settings set to?

Source:

[1] O Mundy, ‘I Know Where Your Cat Lives’ <https://iknowwhereyourcatlives.com>.

[2] ibid.

[3] ibid.

[4] ibid.