I am Sheamus - Very Personal Development

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Earlier today, Darren Rowse at Problogger published a guest post from Rob O’Daniel, who runs the 2Dolphins blog. This post was about Geotagging.

It’s certainly an interesting enough concept. The technology already exists for sites - and blogs - to insert geographical information (latitude, longitude, etc) about themselves into the meta content of their pages. As Rob says:

Once geotagged, media such as websites, blog posts, RSS feeds, images, or videos can be easily displayed on an online map or cross-referenced with other information about that area or location.

Rob goes on to explain in easy-to-understand detail how one can include this information on your own website, even providing a link to a web site called MyGeoPosition.com which will assist you in retrieving this information.

It’s all very straightforward. Very simple.

In fact, it’s too simple. Too easy. And herein lies the problem: the blatant opportunity for deceit.

Whereas the world is mostly full of people who are, at worst, half-decent, it’s also got its share of crooks, exploiters and cads, too. The Internet, as we are all well aware, is somewhat littered with them. Perhaps not to an extent the general media would have you believe, but it’s definitely an issue.

If this geotagging was to ever take off - if it was ever used as one of the various ways to verify the identity of a firm, organisation or individual, what’s to stop another firm, organisation or individual using those same details, and impersonating them? If it’s as easy as simply inserting this data into your meta tags, with nobody at the other end acting as some kind of independent vetter, pretty much anybody can pretend to be pretty much anything.

I mean, if a site like MyGeoPosition.com lets just gather this information without you having to first prove who you are - and of course their reasons for doing this are transparent and community-friendly - then it would be quite straightforward for a small, three-man team in, say, Eastern Europe, to set up a website claiming to be a Wall Street firm, geotag the site so that it actually is on Wall Street, and ring the bell. Heck, why not register MyGoldmanSachs.net and pretend to be them? Who’s going to know any different? Those geotags don’t lie. Right? Although I’d pass on MyBearSterns.com right now (although .org is an option, given it’s essentially non-profit.)

Set up your website, spend a pittance on some pseudo-trading code, spend a little more on advertising, and then offer some ridiculously lucrative incentive for customers to open an account with you. The kind of ‘too good to be true’ offer that most people, even though they know better, can’t refuse. Give it a few months - probably six, maximum - and then disappear with all that lovely capital.

It’s a license to print money. You might not think anyone you know is that stupid, and you yourself might not be that stupid, but lots of other people are, if not daft, then a bit naive. Folk get ripped off all the time. All the time. And any one thing that operates as any kind of legitimiser - even in an unofficial capacity, like this - can be used for deception.

And it’s not just the good guys who need to worry, either (I use ‘good’ in the loosest sense of the term for the boys at Goldman) - even the villains themselves need to be worried. What’s to prevent some two-bit, poorly-trained, Chuckle Brothers-a-like faux-cell that operates out of Essex pretending to represent Al-Qaeda? Just point your geotags at any cave in Afghanistan and away you go.

Which ultimately suggests to me that unless somebody does step up as a verifier, this is all largely going to be ignored. I’m not entirely convinced that even in the kind of world where everybody looks out for each other and nobody has their eye on the prize that it’s really of much use anyway. But in this world, it will definitely serve a purpose. A malicious one.