Can poachers find animals from public camera trap images?

06/21/2021

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by   Sara Beery, et al.

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9

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To protect the location of camera trap data containing sensitive, high-target species, many ecologists randomly obfuscate the latitude and longitude of the camera when publishing their data. For example, they may publish a random location within a 1km radius of the true camera location for each camera in their network. In this paper, we investigate the robustness of geo-obfuscation for maintaining camera trap location privacy, and show via a case study that a few simple, intuitive heuristics and publicly available satellite rasters can be used to reduce the area likely to contain the camera by 87 obfuscation within 1km), demonstrating that geo-obfuscation may be less effective than previously believed.