Björn’s Blog

This idea sprang from my paranoia: sometimes I imagine walking down a lonely alley and being attacked by thugs. I wonder if I saw them from the distance and they looked suspicious, would I take some pictures of them? Would photographing them make them think twice about attacking me? On the other extreme, they might get angry and try to destroy the camera, not without hurting me beforehand.

It is probably not a good idea on relying on the ability to take a picture in an emergency situation like that. Nevertheless, since I just ordered a new mobile phone with GPS capabilities, I wonder about using it for a kind of emergency service. The idea is simple: in an emergency, take a picture and send it to a known address. A service at that address will notify emergency services. Since the picture has GPS information embedded, emergency services can find you easily. From the photo, they might get a good impression for the requirements of the situation.

Another possibility would be for existing photo sharing services like flickr to watch out for certain tags. That way the user would not have to remember an extra address for the emergency photos.

Thinking about it a bit more, some enhancements come to mind. Emergency operators could cooperate with phone network providers to call you back and determine your location even if you don’t have a GPS receiver (this could also work for calls and SMS - not sure if it is being done already). With modern mobile phones, it might be possible to make a life video connection to the scene of emergency and have somebody give you instructions through the phone (for example instruct you how to try to revive somebody). It might be useful to have a software and service that already integrates those features - in theory emergency services might be able to call you on your video phone just like that, but without a standardized way, it is probably too complicated in the actual emergency situation.

Sinister Aspects

While I am not sure how useful such a service could be in reality, some possible sinister aspects also come to mind:

• What if the pictures were open to the public? Some weirdos might be hanging out on the site watching for pictures of bad accidents. Presumably the site would have to be accessible for emergency services only.
• On the other hand, such a site would be a good source of pictures for newspapers and blogs. Maybe a healthy money could be made, which could be donated to a foundation to support victims that don’t have good health insurance.
• The worst: what if the service took off and people would start to photograph everything that seems somewhat suspicious. In no time, we would have a very bad police state situation, worse than fascism, were any activity that is ever so slightly out of line gets reported immediately. Not something I would want to be responsible for.

Since it relies on cooperation with emergency service, this idea would probably not make a good startup. But it might be worthwhile to pitch it to the authorities. Working on a contract that goes back to an idea of my own would still be better than working on something that has nothing to do with my interests whatsoever. Also, contracting with the government is probably a very good deal - after all, they usually don’t care about money, as it is only the taxpayers money they are spending, not their own.

Because of the complications, this is another throwaway idea I probably won’t tackle. But I would be interested in your opinions. If you think it might have some merit, I might change my mind about it.

One thought that excited me recently: the geographical information that is often saved in newer digital photographs via GPS, combined with photo tags on photosharing pages like flickr or just the context of photos, will lead to an implicit tagging of maps.
Probably the information will not be accurate enough to generate maps like “normal” maps from them (that show specific buildings and streets), but surely it will be possible to identify landmarks and other things that are not commonly marked on maps.

For example, I was never sure where or what exactly the “Cote D’Azure” is, so I searched for it on flickr maps, and it already gives me a rough idea of the area. Flickr maps was a bit unsatisfying, though. I suspect they show only a few photos, not all matches. Through the flickr forums I found another service, loc.alize.us that seems to rely on flickr data, but shows a few more hits. I am still not sure what exactly it shows. Anyway, for now there are usually just a few hundred hits, but soon it will be millions, which should provide pretty accurate information.

Another thing I searched for is “Kungsleden”, the name of a trail in Sweden that I walked once upon a time. So far, there are not that many pictures, but you can already see where the path probably is, and I am sure soon it will be a very precise map. It also seems to work quite well for the Camino de Santiago (Jakobsweg in German), at least for the Spanish part.

Another idea to play around with would be the spreading of plants animals, or of fashion and architectural styles. And this article on the effect of names reminded me of a project a former colleague told me about, where he extracted addresses from the phone book to aid his father’s research in the etymology of names. Apparently a lot of interesting things can be derived from names, like how much people moved around in former times. With geotags, it might soon be rather easy to get that information (Facebooks photo service might be very interesting for this, because it encourages tagging pictures with the name of the people who are in it).

I know this thought is probably not very cutting edge. GeoTags have been around for a while, and people are already building services around it (like loc.alize.us). Still, I am intrigued, also because some nice mathematical problems might be involved (for example, determine the real location of something if pictures have been taken from different places. Discover what different tags mean the same thing). The current maps don’t really satisfy my curiosity, and they are probably geared towards different purposes.

I wonder how much data Flickr is giving away through it’s API? I already checked, and the API is not ideal: when you query for a photo, the response doesn’t seem to include the information that if is GeoTagged or not, and it is also not possible as a search parameter. So one has to make an extra check for every photo and get as a response the geotag if it exists, or the info that it doesn’t exist. Still, I didn’t find anything about traffic limits. I don’t know what other photo sharing sites are out there that could be interesting. Also, I wonder if online newspapers and blogs commonly include the geo information in the photos they display. (Another search idea: “accident” could reveal hotspots for accidents).

I’d love to play around with this. So many things to do… But we’ll see, perhaps I’ll actually get around to it eventually. In any case I am now more sure than ever that for my next camera (or camera enabled phone), I want to have that GPS tagging feature. Recommendations are welcome.