Flickr on Tuesday introduced a new feature called geofences which allows users to set geographic privacy settings for each of their photo location tags.
To use the program Flickr users draw a circle on a map to put up a geofence, users then choose the privacy settings they want for that area and all previously uploaded photos along with future uploads in that geofenced area will follow that areas privacy settings.
According to the official Flickr blog:
“You might want to create a geofence around the your ‘home’ or ‘school’ that only allows ‘Friends and Family’ to see the location of the photos you geotag in that area by default,” while they add, “So the next time you upload a photo with a geotag in the radius of a geofence, it will follow the geo privacy setting you’ve designated for that hotspot.”
While Flickr is often slow to innovate the new geofence feature will affect more than 300 million photos and brings the company a much needed boost to their flimsy privacy.
Users will still be able to see photos, they will simply not be given the location data for those photos.
Here’s a closer look at the simple Geofence setup:
