Not Where You Think: Protecting Location Privacy Against Reasoning-Based Geolocation

Shanghao Shi, Jian Xiao, Hao Li, Yuanhaur Chang, Yevgeniy Vorobeychik, Nathan Jacobs, Neal Patwari, Ning Zhang · 2026 · arXiv

DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2610.30439 · open-access PDF

Abstract

Recent large reasoning models can infer where ordinary photos were taken using only visual information, creating a serious location privacy risk even when metadata and obvious geographic identifiers are removed. To understand the mechanism behind such fine-grained localization, we develop GeoTrace, a structured reasoning attack that exposes how models extract location-relevant visual clues and compose them through coarse-to-fine geographic reasoning. We evaluate GeoTrace on a worldwide benchmark of 525 ordinary images spanning natural, urban, residential, and human-centered scenes while exclud

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