Flickr Boosts Location Privacy With Geofences

[Waqas 48]

Flickr has introduced a new privacy feature called geofences that allows users to create geographic privacy settings for photos’ location data.

With the new feature, Flickr users can draw a circle on a map to designate a geofence and then choose a geographic privacy setting for that area. Users can create up to 10 geofences, and previously uploaded photos are also updated with the new geo-privacy settings.

“You might want to create a geofence around the your ‘home’ or ‘school’ that only allows ‘Friends and Family’ to see the location of the photos you geotag in that area by default,” Flickr said in a blog post on the update. “So the next time you upload a photo with a geotag in the radius of a geofence, it will follow the geo privacy setting you’ve designated for that hotspot.”

Flickr, a Yahoo property, has been characterized as slow to innovate, especially amid the mobile photo-sharing boom. The geofences feature, however, addresses one of the primary concerns associated with geotagged images — Flickr claims to have more than 300 million geotagged photos and videos on its site — and should receive a welcome reception from the service’s users.

More About: flickr, geofence, geotagging, photo sharing

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