Not sure if this is true or not but people have pointed out that it uses data from your past conversations to make a guess.

It’s true. Unfortunately I can’t post proof without doxxing myself obviously, but I understand the skepticism considering I’m not sure I’d believe it if I hadn't seen it myself.

I have no memories stored, and in any case it shouldn’t know where I live exactly. The reasoning output didn’t suggest it was relying on any other chat history or information outside the image, but obviously you can’t fully trust it either.

Yeah, I had to turn off chat history after I spotted it doing that.

Also wondering if, as another commenter mentioned, it might be trying to estimate your location just by network means.

It absolutely does that - o3 knows your current location based on IP address etc. This means for a fair test you need to use a photo taken nowhere near your current vicinity - that's why I added examples for Madagascar and Buenos Aires at the end of my post: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/26/o3-photo-locations/#up...

And of course make sure you turn off geotagging in the exif :)

But really, if Google Street View data (or similar) is entirely part of the training dataset it is more than expected that it has this capability.

Thanks! Looks like I missed that last part somehow :)