MagnetoSound wrote on Sun, 09 January 2011 12:13 |
Jon, it's probably just my suspicious mind, but the fact that this is set to default to 'ON', and that you have to dig around to even know about it, puts my teeth on edge.
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And if the manufacturer's defaulted it to "off", then they'd get a flood of complaints about how someone bought their camera because it had geotagging but they'd taken a whole holiday's worth of snaps without tags because it wasn't switched on.
If you've ever had to develop, sell or support products you'll know that as a group, users are really stupid. Individually they might be Nobel prize winning scientists, but put enough of them together and they will make every stupid mistake under the sun, and every mistake will cost you a disproportionate amount of time (and money), so you try to choose the route where the thickest laziest person will have the least hassle possible.
It is your suspicious mind, at least in this case, nobody's going round to the manufacturers and twisting their arms to set the default to on, the manufacturer just has two options and they'll go with the one which makes the most customers happy. When they introduced the feature, that was definitely setting it to "ON", if enough people now get upset and the public and customer relations guys decide it's a better bet, it'll be set to "OFF", end of story.
Not every negative thing that happens is the result of some nefarious master plan.
I'm not dismissing the issue, the OPs point is valid and important, but although it may be more fun to rant about it and blame people it is probably more productive to recognize the issue for what it is, and the solution, and do something about it.
Geotagging on photos is here to stay I would say, but all it needs to keep it under control is for the people developing photo handing software and websites to make it visible and filterable, it's not hard, you just have to convince them that they'll lose enough customers by not having it that it's worth the time to implement it.
Bring it to their attention and some programmers might even do it on their own time because they feel it's the right thing to do, amazing as it may seem, most of them are actually quite nice people.
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I was brought up to question things like this, particularly when there is not much mention made of it at the time of introduction.
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Absolutely, you should question it, but then when the answer is simple and obvious, why go trying to twist it into something more sinister?
If you look on the website listing for the camera, you'll probably see GPS or GeoTagging mentioned, if you look on the box when you buy it, you definitely will (it's there to sell more cameras). They're not trying to hide anything.
What you don't see is a warning that says "Warning, if you photograph something nice and then post the picture on the web without removing the geotag metadata then some nasty person may download the photo, find out where it was taken, and come round and nick the nice thing"... but then if you posted every such warning on every product where some combination of actions could lead to negative results, you wouldn't even have room for the logo on the box, and nobody would read them anyway.