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.
@article{arxiv.2106.11236,
title = {Can poachers find animals from public camera trap images?},
author = {Sara Beery and Elizabeth Bondi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2106.11236},
year = {2021}
}