(photo: author)

Owen Mundy, artist and teacher at Florida State University, has used the metadata attached to photos posted on the internet to track where a million of the world’s cats live, and he’s put their home lairs on an interactive world map. According to Mundy, the web has some 15 million images tagged with the word “cat,” with more uploaded every minute.

If this strange project were only about cats, Mundy’s experiment wouldn’t have received the media attention he’s been getting. Rather, the point of his experiment is to show how easily the locational coordinates embedded in these publicly shared photos can be extracted and linked to (pretty) precise locations.

When you look at the map, you see the streets and rooftops of houses and apartment buildings and back yards that are homes to these charming felines and their amusing antics, but anyone else—say, megacorporations who want to sell you something and scrape every scrap of information about you—are more interested in the cat owners. You watch the cat. They watch you holding the cat. You see the cat playing. They see the inside of your living room. Well, not my living room, Grant and Sherman’s picture isn’t on the map, but 22 other Princeton cats are. I’m going to take a look.

What first appears as an amusing meditation on the prevalence of fur turns into a biting commentary on privacy.