By Andrew Dowell
Score one small setback for creepiness.
Location-based social network Foursquare Labs has cut off access to its technology for an application that made it possible for guys to pinpoint the location of nearby women on a map and view their personal data and photographs.
What really raised privacy concerns about the app â€" unabashedly named Girls Around Me [1] â€" is that the women it tracked hadn’t opted into the service and weren’t made aware this was going on.
Here’s how it worked. The app took information women made public about their location on Foursquare, paired it with photos and personal details those same women made public on Facebook, and then put it all together on a map to show names and faces of women near a user’s location.
“Girls Around Me is the perfect complement to any pick-up strategy,†the app’s website says. “And with millions of chicks checking in daily, there’s never been a better time to be on the hunt.â€
You can sort of imagine the idea sounding funny to a basement full of college-age hackers in a coding frenzy sometime after midnight. But in the real world, it felt like stalking. Foursquare determined that the app went too far and cut off its access to its location data.
“The application was in violation of our API policy, so we reached out to the developer and shut off their API access,†a Foursquare spokeswoman said Saturday.
The app’s Russian developer, i-Free Innovations, didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
A Facebook spokeswoman said the app is currently inaccessible and pointed to information [2] on how users can make their information private.
The app is still available in Apple’s App Store, but without Foursquare’s support, it doesn’t do anything.
The Girls Around Me fiasco â€" revealed in compelling detail by the Cult of Mac blog [3] â€" comes as app developers are putting effort into blending the online world of social networking with the real world of face to face encounters.
Foursquare itself was an early explorer of this territory and among the most successful. Another start-up, Color, had a brief moment of fame last year after raising millions of dollars to fund its service, which enabled people to see all the photos taken at a particular location, even if they were taken by strangers.
More recently, the South by Southwest conference saw lots of interest in “ambient social networking†apps like Highlight, Sonar and Banjo, all of which let you know about people nearby who share interests or connections with you.
The idea that people might be able to anonymously view a mashup of your personal details and location probably makes a lot of people nervous. You can argue Girls Around Me took the idea over the line by explicitly introducing sex into the mix. But the bigger issue, as artfully explained by Cult of Mac, is that Girls Around Me starkly exposed the amount of information people are sharing about themselves and the sorts of scary scenarios that can come about when that information is pulled together.
Confusing privacy settings on services like Facebook bear some of the blame. But it’s also a case of user beware.
Links
- ^ Girls Around Me (girlsaround.me)
- ^ pointed to information (www.facebook.com)
- ^ by the Cult of Mac blog (www.cultofmac.com)
No comments:
Post a Comment