Interactive Map: Trip to the Town of Little Mermaids

View Trip to the town of the Little Mermaids in a larger map

The pitfalls of Neogeography

   While neogeography, characterized by accessible to users around the world, has been useful in providing instant informations to its users, pitfalls arise from all the benefits. Two of them are loss of privacy and information inaccuracy.
   With neogeography tools such as Google maps with street views, pictures from ordinary people taken at any time can be uploaded online for the whole world to see. While this can be convenient for virtual tourists, people actually appearing in the picture may feel uncomfortable for being exposed at certain places. For example, someone wearing a high school uniform definitely does not want to be posted in a picture entering a liquor store on a school day. Privacy cannot be ensured when you have to look out for everyone that has a camera on his or her phone. Hence, authorities of such useful tools should consider filtering the photos posted online or at least try to get consent from the person shot in the picture. 
    Another aspect we have to look out for is information accuracy. With the accessibility to editing the information posted online, it is very likely that information that is not accurate or tested is posted online. With low media literacy level, many viewers may intuitively think what they get from the internet is always correct, which is obviously not guaranteed in the case of Wikipedia. An example is the interactive map I posted in this blog. I had the opportunity to edit the notes I post to every spot I tagged. If a note a price of a dish at a certain restaurant now, it is very likely that 3 years from now, the information will not be up to date and will lose its original usefulness.
   In summary, while more use of neogeography is an emerging trend among global users for personal usage, one has to be aware of the information acquired online and the developers of the tools should be careful not to breach the law in terms of privacy issues.