Can poachers find animals from public camera trap images?

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that simple heuristics and satellite data can significantly reduce the effectiveness of geo-obfuscation in protecting camera trap locations, potentially exposing sensitive wildlife data.

Contribution

It reveals that common geo-obfuscation methods may be insufficient, showing how easily camera locations can be inferred using publicly available tools.

Findings

Geo-obfuscation reduces camera location uncertainty by 87%.

Simple heuristics and satellite rasters can identify likely camera sites.

Geo-obfuscation may be less effective than previously thought.

Abstract

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% (assuming random obfuscation within 1km), demonstrating that geo-obfuscation may be less effective than previously believed.