What I found most interesting about the web-mapping article was that it was displayed and loaded in tiles. I had never noticed before, but when you zoom in there is indeed different places and different tiles that it takes you. I had always wondered why MapQuest ceased to exist and I guess now I know why, because it was always one big image. Also what I thought was interesting was that you had to be connected to the Internet in order to figure out where you were going. However, your phone is still able to track your location when you are not connected to Internet so I am unsure of how this works. When I was abroad I could always look on Google Maps and see exactly where my location was. This came in use when it came to my pictures. Even though I wasn’t connected to WiFi or cellular data, my phone was able to locate where I was taking my pictures and separated them by place.
Indeed, this could not be possible without web mapping. Even when my photos were all taken on the same day and I only moved around a little, they still appeared on the map in different locations (pictured above). While I do think this is useful and handy, I also find it a little creepy. When I was abroad I was shocked that I could see where I was on the map even though I wasn’t connected to Internet. There was nothing except for my phone and Google knew where I was. Web mapping is incredibly useful and I can’t picture our society today without GPS while driving (help us all if that day ever comes…) but there is still a sense of privacy I would like to maintain that I think may just be gone forever. However, I guess that is what happens with all of technology in today’s age; privacy is slowly diminishing as more and more things are being posted to the web with tags and metadata linking them to companies and specific people. Web mapping has definitely made this more possible by focusing on specific regions to locate who took what images and where.