Be careful when asking the Internet to Photoshop a photo for you. The results may be unexpected and you could find yourself turned into the latest Internet meme. A Dutch food blogger named Sid Frisjes found that out recently after one of his vacation snapshots took off online.
A Colorado mother learned an important lesson of her own last week when her plan to teach her daughter just how quickly a photograph can spread online through social media worked far too well.
We reported yesterday that the FBI has issued an open call for photographs and videos that may help provide clues in the Boston Marathon bombing case. Since that time, investigators have begun circulating photos of two "possible suspects" spotted in images of the scene, suggesting that analyzing crowdsourced images has indeed been useful in this case.
It's not just government law enforcement that is attempting to use public photographs to identify the attacker, though: the large online communities Reddit and 4chan have also begun carrying out their own crowdsourced photo analysis.
This past Monday, someone posted a photo to imageboard 4chan showing a Burger King employee stomping on two tubs of lettuce. The caption read "This is the lettuce you eat at Burger King." Other tech-savvy vigilante users immediately pounced on the case in hopes of identifying the poster. Unfortunately for the lettuce defiler, the photograph was taken with geotagging enabled, allowing the EXIF data to be used to zero in on the precise restaurant where the image was created: 1475 Worton Boulevard, Mayfield Heights, OH.