Multimodal geolocation inference: from a seemingly ordinary photo, I can guess where you took it
In one sentence precise street-level accuracy is still limited today — in peer-reviewed numbers, even a purpose-built fine-tuned + chain-of-thought framework only hits about 28.7% within the 1km threshold (ETHAN, PoPETs 2025). So the threat isn't "I can pinpoint every photo"; it's that this capability is already deployed at scale and improving fast. Conclusion first: treating "I stripped the EXIF, so it's safe" as a talisman is false security — the location cues live in the image content itself, so defense has to land on notice-and-restraint before upload, not just on stripping metadata.