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Who says they don't already? I knew a guy who worked for a major government agency who's job was to look over horrible pictures to try to figure out where they were taken.
I bet the most skilled people do work for them, not just youtube. But talking to that guy, it's a tough job, not for everyone. Instead of a random streetview image it's a scene of abuse, so...
You can get jobs like that, sure. Normally called GIS analyst (geospatial informations systems)
For a while, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service GIS job applications were less about ticking boxes and more looking at a satellite image of a structure and being asked, "what is this, where is it, and why is it interesting"
And the answer might be "Its ostensibly a wastewater treatment plant, its in southern Iran, and its interesting because the truck parked next to the liquid chemical tank farm has an ISO gas storage trailer, not an ISO liquid storage container as might be expected.
I'm sure that those agencies have been contacting top players for that game over the last few years. But if those simply dont want to work for them, thats moot.
I wouldn’t be surprised to find they created the game. And if not, sponsored the competitions.
Great way to scout that kind of talent.
Israel intelligence has a division dedicated to neurodivergent people who scour satellite photos. So wouldn't be surprised if they have people like this on payroll. A lot of ONSIT already have people like this participating doing geolocation on war footage.
I could monetize my favourite hobby?
(Assuming someone NON-genocidal valued it)
You can't assume it won't be weaponized, in fact you should expect it.
The problem is getting the pictures to work from. People who don't want to be found aren't giving the CIA pictures of their locations, and I'd imagine the CIA already knows what road signs look like in different countries, or where certain mountains and other features are.
The problem is getting the pictures. It's intel collection, not processing.
the CIA already knows what road signs look like in different countries, or where certain mountains and other features are.
I mean "the CIA" isn't a person. Someone there does this work. Which is what we're talking about.
If you read about what they did and how incompetent they are, i wouldn't be surprised if they employ some nepotism guy who looks looks at pictures and goes: uuuh, not alabama.
Wait till you find out how good ai is at pinpointing a picture.
I never received any offers.
I just assume they're super lucky. Or that they play so much, they recognize when it shows them the same picture because it doesn't have an infinite set of images.
They use Google street view, so it's a ton.
Like the other guy said, it's street view. So the number of images isn't quite infinite, but it's high enough that just memorizing the images isn't realistic.
Because of that, though, road patterns are a solid chunk of what the really good players are looking for/at. There's definitely more to it than that, but because of the nature of the game there's almost literally always a road in view.
My guess is that some memorization exists, check the geoguesser grand finals, there was one play where both players marked the exact same spot with absolutely no clues another that "maybe Mongolia".
There's definitely memorization, but there's just a ton of tricks that aren't explicitly memorizing the images themselves.
They can sometimes narrow down the area based on the car that's taking the images, or how wide the lens is. As a made up example, if they see a red toyota corolla is the car taking the photos- which they can tell based on the mirrors appearing- they know it's specifically mainland Malaysia.
Very small context based clues a lot of the time.
You should check out Rainbolt's Geoguesser runs. He often narrates his thought process as he goes. He's looking at things like the angle of the sun and shadows to determine what hemisphere of the planet he's on, looks at the vegetation and soil types to further pinpoint his longitude, etc. He'll even take photos sent directly to him from viewers, and he'll find out exactly where the photo was taken, even if that image had never existed on the internet prior.
Some of these guys are insanely talented at this. Rainbolt is probably the most entertaining and educational, IMO. Definitely worth checking out some of his videos.
GeoWizard (especially his Geo Detective videos) and zi8gzag are also very talented. I love how they talk through the process to find a place, even though a lot of their initial starting points are from clues that they've seen hundreds of times to single out a region.
It has a practically infinite set of images. Seriously, I've seen people do geoguesser and get nothing but back roads in the middle of basically Anywhere, Earth; I've seen people get stuck inside malls, go into caves, walk down random-ass rabbit trails in the middle of a forest surrounded by miles of fucking nothing (I wish I could remember what video I saw that in, it was fucking insane). Geoguesser pulls from the full catalog of Google Street view images, and there are a lot of street view images.