After trying with the free ChatGPT at least, I don't think this would be too much of an additional privacy risk. E.g. I submitted a photo I've taken with a feature with a particular architecture style in the front, and a city canal in the background, and told ChatGPT it was taken in China. It separated the feature and canal correctly, but still guessed wrong. I did remove the EXIF information, as ChatGPT tried to extract GPS info and failed at first.
I guess as long as there are no major visible features (e.g. a huge mountain), and you sanitized the metadata, you will be fine (regarding ChatGPT).
Have you tried this with o3? I think o3 is much better at this than any of the free models
I did not (OpenAI does not allow Chinese to pay for Plus due to politics, and I couldn't be bothered to try circumventing it), and I am curious about it because it does seem like a very difficult job.
I did try the latest Qwen though, and it was able to locate to the correct city, but it's still tens of km off (it guessed a tourist attraction in the city center instead of the actual district).
o3 is a massive difference indeed; i just took a random picture outside my country house (so the house is not on there) in the middle of nowhere, removed all the meta info, set my vpn to the other side of the world and tried it; it guessed it very close from a few far away landmarks. Very impressive.