Think You’re Anonymous? 5 Ways AI Can Find You Without GPS

For years, privacy advice has been relatively straightforward: turn off location services, strip location metadata from photographs, keep your face out of pictures, and be careful about what personal information you post online.

Artificial intelligence is beginning to complicate that advice.

A new generation of AI systems doesn’t necessarily need you to explicitly reveal where you are or even who you are. Instead, machines are becoming increasingly capable of extracting clues buried inside photographs, videos, voices and surveillance footage — clues most people would never notice.

Some of these technologies have obvious benefits. They could help locate hostages, identify criminals, combat human trafficking and find threats on battlefields.

But they also raise an uncomfortable question.

What happens to privacy when hiding the obvious information is no longer enough?

Here are five technologies showing how quickly that world is approaching.

1. AI Can Figure Out Where Your Video Was Recorded

One of the clearest examples comes directly from the U.S. intelligence community.

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, or IARPA, launched a program called LocUS — Location Using Sound — designed to automatically geolocate multimedia even when accurate location metadata isn’t available.

Instead of depending solely upon GPS coordinates, LocUS is intended to combine visual and audio information to determine where previously unseen video was recorded, both indoors and outdoors. Potential national-security applications include hostage recovery and human-trafficking interdiction.

Think about the implications for an ordinary video.

A building in the background. The sound of traffic. Local architecture. Vegetation. Terrain. A distant announcement. Street markings.

Individually, such details may mean very little. Combined and compared against enormous databases, they can become clues.

Removing the GPS tag doesn’t remove the world visible — and audible — around you.

2. AI May Recognize You Without Seeing Your Face

Facial recognition gets most of the attention, but a face isn’t the only biometric characteristic people reveal.

Researchers have been developing gait-recognition systems capable of analyzing the distinctive way people walk. Characteristics such as body proportions, stride, posture and movement can potentially contribute to identifying or matching individuals.

That creates an important distinction.

A person wearing a mask may have hidden his face without hiding his identity.

Gait recognition isn’t infallible. Clothing, injuries, camera angles and other factors can affect results, and it shouldn’t be treated as some magical identification system.

But AI doesn’t necessarily need one perfect biometric if it can combine multiple imperfect ones.

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