Professional “geoguessrs” demonstrate dangers of posting photos online

ByCraig Haley

Imagine posting a photo online of yourself standing next to an empty road, with only trees in the background below a relatively clear, sunny sky. And that’s it. No buildings, road signs, landmarks or other identifiers that could let someone guess where you were standing. You could be almost anywhere in the world.

And then hours later, someone replies to you the exact location where you were standing on Google Street View – accurate to a mere handful of metres.

The initial suspicion is perhaps that someone managed to extract the EXIF metadata from the photo, which can include the GPS location of where the photo was taken. But no, we’re not talking about that (this time). Besides, these days most social networks automatically erase that data over privacy concerns.

Not that that matters much based on the ostensibly spooky abilities of the people we’re discussing here.


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And those people are professional ‘GeoGuessrs’, named after a popular online game whereby people try and use information in a random Google Street View photo to guess exactly where in the world the photo is located. People who can use the most innocuous details in images to help track down exactly where your photo was taken – talents that are just as impressive as they are a potential privacy nightmare.

But let’s start with the “impressive”.

This week, content creator and chess player Anna Cramling publicly set the challenge on Twitter with the below photo that matches the description laid out in the first paragraph of this article. Empty road. Trees. Sunny sky – (she also posted the time of when the photo was taken.) That’s it.

It was a little over 4 hours before she was successfully tracked down. The reply – from professional GeoGuessr Rainbolt (with help from Havrd_speedruns) – contained her exact position on Google Street View. Impressive, since from a layman’s perspective, she could have been almost anywhere. Turns out, she was in Sweden.

GeoGuessrs like Rainbolt rely on an impressive arsenal of geographic knowledge – such as what side of the road cars drive on in a particular country – as well as publicly available tools to aid them.

User Rainbolt – a.k.a. Trevor Rainbolt, who runs a successful TikTok channel where he showcases his geoguessing abilities – provides some insight into his workings, claiming that in this case he instantly knew that Anna’s photo was in Sweden from the road markings, and checked weather tools to match the clouds in the photo and calculate the angle of the road using the position of the sun. And from there, it was simply a case of using Google to navigate any matching road until the exact location was found.

Other techniques can including knowledge of location-specific architecture, road types, fauna and wildlife, as well as information on license plates and foreign languages, all stitched together with an inherent ability to analyse and investigate anything in a photo that may offer up some clue as to where it was taken. And if a street sign appears in the photo, well, that certainly helps.

And now moving on to the privacy nightmare.

While GeoGuessr’s like Rainbolt use their impressive array of talents solely for things like social media challenges and even helping people find where sentimental photos were taken, there is of course a darker side to being able to find where photos were taken.


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Unscrupulous users, crooks, stalkers and a whole host of others could capitalise on these methods in similar ways but for more sinister reasons. If users out there can locate you based on trees and roads, it’s likely that most photos are likely to give a person away with the right amount of time, patience and knowledge.

And that’s something to think about when you’re posting photos on social media and the Internet. And a good reason to ensure that you have your privacy settings correct on platforms like Facebook and Instagram, and to be more aware of what you post on inherently more public platforms like Threads and Twitter.

Remember, if you post a photo of yourself online, you need to be prepared that someone out there in cyberspace could potentially determine where that photo was taken. So if you’re posting a photo of where you live, or where you’re staying, it’s worth remembering that there are people out there with the knowledge and know-how to pair a photo of an empty road and trees to an exact Google Street View location. So they probably won’t have too much trouble finding a street or hotel.

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