I Know Where Your Cat Lives, A Data Experiment Featuring Public Pictures of Cats on a World Map Based on Metadata

I Know Where Your Cat Lives is a data experiment by Owen Mundy featuring public pictures of cats on a world map based on latitude and longitude coordinates obtained in their metadata. Mundy used at supercomputer at Florida State University to run the 1 million pictures of cats gathered from publicly available APIs through a series of clustering algorithms in order to prepare them for the site. Mundy is currently raising funds to pay for hosting via a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign.

This project explores two uses of the internet: the sociable and humorous appreciation of domesticated felines, and the status quo of personal data usage by startups and international megacorps who are riding the wave of decreased privacy for all. This website doesn’t visualize all of the cats on the net, only the ones that allow you to track where their owners have been.

images via Owen Mundy

via The New York Times The Upshot