New technology has emerged that could identify where you live from a single photo inside your home, as one ethical hacker shares a terrifying warning for the future of this technology.
Guessing locations based on images has become a bit of a trend on social media in recent years, as skilled individuals are able to track down specific areas based on otherwise innocuous details inside a single photo.
What was a harmless game might now be transforming into a dystopian future with major cybersecurity fears though, as an ethical hacker has revealed new software that can pinpoint your home address on just a single image inside the house.
How does this home tracking technology work?
As revealed by ethical hacker Ryan Monthomery, otherwise known by his pseudonym '0day', software known as GeoSpy can now be used to track down any home's location when it's fed an image of one of the rooms.
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"Photos you've taken inside your house can now be located," Montgomery explains, before diving straight into the terrifying demonstration.
He uses a completely normal image of a bedroom in San Francisco, and the room has no real distinguishing features beyond a black metal bed frame and white wardrobe at the rear of the room.
Entering the image into GeoSpy's AI tracking tool though quickly locates not just the apartment that this photo was taken in but the exact room that we're looking at from multiple angles, all in just a matter of seconds.
It appears to work from existing house listings, so it won't necessarily be able to locate every single house in the country but it shows not only how impressive this tech is at sorting through countless different images, but how scarily quick and accurate it can be.
What is Geospy used for?
Thankfully GeoSpy isn't currently available to the public and is exclusively used within law enforcement - and 0day explains that this particular part of their tool is only utilized in child crime cases, likely to use the background of videos to pinpoint a suspect.
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"GeoSpy is an advanced platform integrating powerful AI location models for your city or country," the company's website explains. "Delivering up to meter level accuracy, state of the art computer vision models all in an easy to use interface. Available for qualified government and enterprise organizations."
While it's great that GeoSpy themselves have artificially restricted access to an incredibly powerful tool, what worries Montgomery is the potential for other rival software to bring this tech to the public.
"Any other service could come out in the future with the same thing," he explains, "so be careful what you post and stay safe."
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It might make you think twice before you share that new photo of you in your room onto Instagram though, and that could then be used against you in the future with a similar AI-tracking tool.