Is this spyware? WordPress introduce ‘geotags’ November 16, 2009
Posted by Phil Groom in Technology.Tags: Anonymous Blogging, geolocation, geotag, geotags, Pseudonymous Blogging, Spyware, Using Pseudonyms, We know where to find you, WordPress
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Sometimes you need to say something anonymously or under a pseudonym, and until now it’s felt fairly safe to do that when blogging or commenting on blogs, secure in the knowledge that neither your name nor your location can be easily traced.
But now, it seems that those days are coming to an end as WordPress introduce ‘geotags’: see A Blog Near You and the Geotag Support Page to find out all about it. Thankfully they’ve made it an opt-in service, otherwise every time you posted or commented, you’d find not only the date and time but also your location neatly appended to your post.
Perhaps I’m being paranoid, but to me this seems a tag too far: it feels far too much like spyware and I’ll be leaving it turned off for all my blogs. Thanks, WordPress people, but no thanks.
I understand what you are saying, but even if you enable it (& expose the data WordPress is collecting anyway), I as a contributor can chose whether to include my location information or not.
Whether WP should collect that data at all is another matter.
Very good point, Simon. There’s no escape: on the street, CCTV everywhere; online, they know where we are. Surveillance society!