Instagram Is Killing Photo Maps (mashable.com)

Instagram is dropping the Photo Map feature from its service. The feature allowed one to see where a person took a photo. The company began removing the feature, it confirmed to Mashable. The social networking service added that it is currently focusing on removing maps on profiles of other people, but soon you (that is, if you use the service), will lose access to your own photo map as well. The company said: Photo Map was not widely used, so we've decided to remove the feature and focus on other priorities.

Comments

Licensing

[Anonymous Coward]

The map data costs too much.

Re:Licensing

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should it be overly costly? Just use "Open Street Maps" (an open source dataset) and put a credit and disclaimer on it. As long as you not trying to do address geolocation or display high resolution imagery you can get quite a few reasonably decent open/free datasets. At most they may have to keep a GIS person on staff and some IMS servers up and running (again you can find some open source options).

We don't want people scraping this data

[Anonymous Coward]

We want the data of where you took the photo all to ourselves, so we can sell it to people.

DROP A PIN ON UR MAP 4 THIS DICPICS

[Anonymous Coward]

 

So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody does anything worthwhile on social media. it's just an entertainment platform.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Eh.. it's just that whenever a site claims it's "social networking" it becomes doomed to not being very social. That's why Facebook was never able to get any significant amount of social content.

Meanwhile, here on Slashdot... since this isn't "social," we sometimes get into real conversations (though also a lot of stupid flames and trolling) and I run into various people I've been chatting-with, off-and-on, since around the turn-of-the-century. Thank Knuth that Slashdot never went social, so we're still able to socialize here.

I bet it was a security issue

[gurps_npc]

Frankly, telling people where photos are taken has some major risks.

Oh look, that guy posted a pic of his 16 year old daughter in their pool!

Re:I bet it was a security issue

[Luthair]

Yea, as a non-instagram user I always wondered why they had it from a stalker perspective. That said, it would be trivial to fix by moving the location to the city center.

Re:I bet it was a security issue

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, as a non-instagram user I always wondered why they had it from a stalker perspective. That said, it would be trivial to fix by moving the location to the city center.

Yeah, using the city center could not possibly cause any problems

Re:I bet it was a security issue

[Anonymous Coward]

It was always snapped to the whatever the name of place was.

Re:I bet it was a security issue

[Anonymous Coward]

The bigger issue is people sharing photos with geodata on them without realizing it, not the fact that Instagram was using the data that people are themselves posting. Software makers (phone, camera, web, etc) need to provide more obvious indications of what information is being attached to the photos, and giving users the ability to trim out the parts they don't want included. You don't (or shouldn't) blame a webcam manufacture for providing a feature that allows you to freely post the webcams footage to the internet, only if the feature is on by default and can't be easily turned off.

Re:I bet it was a security issue

[LeftCoastThinker]

This exactly. There is never a good reason to geo tag your family photos. This feature should be off by default and have a pop up warning every time you use your camera if it is enabled. Companies like Facebook and Google love the geo tagging because it lets them further spy on their users, but for the rest of us it is just a bad idea...

Re:I bet it was a security issue

[Anonymous Coward]

It was always fun when somebody would post a photo of their cat or whatever, and then I'd privately message them with a picture of their house from outside. Some people appreciated the heads up, while others weren't too pleased how I went about it.

Re:I bet it was a security issue

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, that isn't a similar problem.

Re:I bet it was a security issue

[SeaFox]

Frankly, telling people where photos are taken has some major risks.

Oh look, that guy posted a pic of his 16 year old daughter in their pool!

While I can see your angle this feels -- highly paranoid? People that worried about that their families need to get over themselves. If they think their family is that juicy a target they need to stop partaking in social media at all. Do these same people make their daughters wear burqas when they go out in public as well? Not for religious reasons, but a great way to hide that they have a teenage girl?

Re:I bet it was a security issue

[Anonymous Coward]

In many countries a location of a teenage girl does not automatically invite rapist-murderers. I have concerns about the location data but they are related to the fact that I have collected some nice toys at my cabin in the countryside and I don't want the social media to know where these (unlocked) machines are.

Modern Terminology Confusion

[SuperKendall]

Instagram is Killing Photo Maps

Finally! Someone is doing an amazing job of integrating maps with photos!

Instagram is dropping the Photo Map feature from its service.

Oh.

Re: Modern Terminology Confusion

[Anonymous Coward]

Never heard of a bear, or a manatee? Care to explain, since you are obviously so deeply rooted in the community?

Re: Modern Terminology Confusion

[Anonymous Coward]

*applause*

(cheeky!)

Re:Modern Terminology Confusion

[Anonymous Coward]

or, maybe related to privacy issues:

https://np.reddit.com/r/Cyberpunk/comments/513alg/what_is_something_very_cyberpunk_that_you_have/d78zep0

Netcraft confirms

[Anonymous Coward]

Photo Maps is dying

You can tell they're a farcebook company

[Anonymous Coward]

We've created a great new feature!
And then removed it because it's useful and we want to dumb you down.

Instagram?

[umghhh]

What is that?

where's the andnothingofvaluewaslost tag?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where's the andnothingofvaluewaslost tag? I'd probably say the same about the entire instagram going away, I mean we were getting better and better picture quality decade after decade until instragram suddenly threw us back into the 70's... Not that I don't like many things about the seventies, e.g. we were sending crafts like the Voyagers, we had Space 1999 (complete with intro brilliantly mixing funk with instrumental), but whenever I see those old polaroids I do wish they were a bit clearer, wider, with better colors so that I could make out what they are showing a bit better...

Re:where's the andnothingofvaluewaslost tag?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck widescreen, man. It's just another element in the pie of low attention span.

Only available to paying customers

[Anonymous Coward]

i.e., not you.

Or they did not want to build geofencing?

[MastaBaba]

Perhaps they want to drop the feature because they don't want to build geofencing into the service?

killing maps, burning books...

[farialima]

I just stumbled on this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... (China's censorship on maps)

and I suddenly realized how deleting maps is as close as you can get from burning books nowadays: textual information rarely entirely disappears from the internet (copy-paste too easy :) ), but non-textual, non-image based, information -- in particularly maps -- easily does...

Now I can't stalk my girlfriend!

[Anonymous Coward]

Found out where the guy my ex was sleeping with lived because she posted a pic from there. Now what am I supposed to do???

Re:Now I can't stalk my girlfriend!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wish him a happy life!

still GPS tagged ?

[johnjones]

so after killing the map are the photo's going to be scrubbed of GPS/Location data ?
going forward ?

any information ?

John

Must Be Simple

[theshowmecanuck]

I'm just hoping they'll implement a rotate feature so we can turn our phones on their side some day to look at pictures in portrait mode better. I must be simple. I generally keep location services turned off on my devices at all times, so don't worry or care about the maps feature. The portrait mode/rotate feature is one of the main reasons I also share on Flickr. Their presentation is much better, even if it is overly complex to use.