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Not too long ago, Geo-location was one of the hottest new digital fads to hit the social world. Utilised for years by Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, it could be said that at the beginning 2013 the world of geo-location had disappeared from public consciousness.

But should we be at all surprised?

In a world where security is becoming ever tighter, should we be at all comfortable in disclosing our exact location to the internet? Of course, 99 per cent of the time checking in to your local Michelin restaurant may only result in a few jealous friends. But you may not be so lucky, and with sites such as pleaserobme.com (a site dedicated to tagging your location in relation to your home) parts of the online (and offline) world may just be out to get you.

Although it may seem that society is merely suffering from a prolonged period of paranoia, the United States military has taken geotagging very seriously.

In a release by the official page of the United States Army, they said:

“A deployed service member’s situational awareness includes the world of social media. If a Soldier uploads a photo taken on his or her smartphone to Facebook, they could broadcast the exact location of their unit.”

This should come as very little surprise however as in 2007, four AH-64 Apache helicopters were destroyed in Iraq after pictures were released on the internet, giving the enemy the exact location of the vehicles.

With people and soldiers adding hundreds of ‘friends’ on social sites - many of whom they may have never met - the risk becomes ever greater.

But how many people use geotagging now?

In a study carried out by the Digital Photography School, they asked their readers just how much they used geotagging while taking pictures - in 2009 and again in 2012. The results are very interesting indeed.

2012

• 2% that they used to geotag but no longer do
• 7% reported that they geotag all their images
• 19% reported that they tagged occasionally
• 72% said that they had never tagged their images.

By comparison, what were the results three years earlier?

2009

• 3% said that they tag all their images
• 8% reported that they tagged occasionally
• 3% said that they no longer tag their images
• 62% said that they have never tagged their images.

This means that back in 2009, 35% of photographers geotagged all the time, compared to only 26% of 2012.

More to the point however, 65% said that they didn’t tag anymore in 2009, opposed to 74% in 2012.

Can geotagging be used as a force for good however?

The truth is that it can. In America around 70 per cent of calls received by 911 are now from mobile/ wireless devices.

And following new rules imposed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 911 services can now locate a call using a wireless handsets geographic location.

“Such improvements enable emergency response personnel to ensure that Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs) receive meaningful, accurate location information from wireless 911 callers in order to dispatch local emergency responders to the correct location and to provide assistance to 911 callers more quickly.”

The rules now state that certain mobile phones will provide the latitude and longitude of a caller and can be accurate within a range of 300 meters, depending on the technology used to make the call.

Not all phones will have this capability however, and some providers may choose to actually rescind the measure.

So is geotagging here to stay?

The general public seems to have fallen out of love with geotagging; what was once a quite nifty technology is now used by very few people, rendering it redundant and awash with privacy concerns.

Geotagging does seem to have other more important uses, and if utilised by the right people it could have the ability to save lives.

And that is a very useful and worthy technology to have, even if it’s not necessarily the “coolest” thing to do.