Earth monitoring needs imagery from space and from the ground, but the latter is lacking.

Why unlock (not collect)?

While satellite imagery archives are easily accessible, ground imagery archives are largely locked in billions of smartphones.

The volume of valuable geotagged photos locked in billions of smartphones is likely to be orders of magnitude larger than the data available in all public repositories combined. Most people have never used specialised data collection apps. However, most people have been taking photos of their environment for more than a decade.

Unlike a data collection campaign, which can take weeks or months, a data unlocking campaign can be completed within hours, which reduces the costs of ground truth data generation dramatically.

Why decentralised?

askphotos.earth is designed to support organisations with trusted networks of people on the ground, because data unlocking requires the trust that these organisations have built with their networks over the years or decades.

askphotos.earth's workflow and free and open-source technology are designed so that:

• the data remains under the control of the organisation that unlocks it. askphotos.earth does not have access to any of the data unlocked.
• the organisation that unlocks the data is responsible for developing consent mechanisms and data protection protocols.
• the organisations can customise the technology to extract the semantics they need from the geotagged photos.