GigaOm reports on a National Science Foundation-funded project called Teaching Privacy and a related online tool that lets users track the location of Twitter and Instagram users. Both the project and the “Ready or Not” tool aim to educate individuals—particularly high school students—about online privacy and how our personal information forms a digital footprint. Expanding on the Ready or Not geo-tracking tool, Gerald Friedland, an International Computer Science Institute researcher working on the Teaching Privacy project, said, “Most people…do not know that if you tweet something this location data is actually publicly available.” The researchers are also working on a study showing that an anonymous account holder of a service such as Yelp can have reviews cross-referenced with location data and timestamps on other services to reveal the user’s identity.
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