You Dunno Where This Cat Lives

Another benefit using Leica Q, or any camera without GPS built-in: Location information isn’t captured with photos, and, as such, cannot easily be made available across the Wild Wild Web (yes, that’s what the WWW really represents). I know, from memory, that the Featured Image was shot somewhere along Adams Ave. in San Diego’s Normal Heights neighborhood. But I can’t exactly recall where.

Perhaps because kitties are so popular on the Internet, nearly four-year-old website “I Know Where Your Cat Lives” uses them to make a privacy point, by showing how pics shared online reveal location. Ah, like your residence! “Hey, Look. That’s Jack’s living room, and there’s Frisky”. 

In answer to question “What is the point of all this?” in the site’s FAQs: “We set out on this adventure with a mission in mind: to point out the ease of access to data and photos on the web. We sought to showcase how readily available social media users’ information and snapshots are to the general public”. Dog-loving cat-haters, you have a roadmap to your, ah, roadkill.

Academic Owen Mundy is responsible for bringing the site to life. There’s an addictive quality, though, if you click too much. Nowhere else will you find so many cats collected from so many places around the planet. I find location voyeurism to be as enjoyable as the furry beasts. It’s a feline travelogue.

As for the images accompanying this post, they’re one in the same. The first is a horizontal crop of the second, which also is tweaked for composition. Vitals, aperture manually set: f/5.6, ISO 100, 1/250 sec, 28mm; 12:19 p.m. PST, yesterday.