

The Girls Around Me App Takes Creepy to a New Level - rvcamo
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/30/girls-around-me-ios-app-takes-creepy-to-a-new-level/

======
sp332
This app just shows what we've known, or should have known, about Facebook and
Foursquare. When you check in, people know where you are! and every public
piece of data on Facebook is available to every frat rat and creepy stalker on
the planet. Somehow the author realized that "normal" people don't think about
it that way. The article isn't news so much as a PSA.

Odd that whoever wrote the headline decided to directly contradict the
author's conclusion at the bottom: this isn't anything new.

~~~
Zirro
"Somehow the author realized that "normal" people don't think about it that
way."

Could someone with a bit more understanding of "normal" people explain why
this is? There are many cases where people seem to throw caution out of the
window just because they're on the Internet. It doesn't make sense to me.

~~~
ahelwer
The concept of a public lifestyle does exist, and I'd say it's a good sign
that people do not live in constant fear of their neighbours.

~~~
rglullis
The thing is, this is the Internet. _Everyone_ is your neighbor.

And you raise a false dichotomy. Just because someone wants to exercise their
right to privacy does not imply one is in "constant fear" of others.

~~~
ahelwer
I was using neighbour to refer to the concept of the fellow (wo)man. I did not
mean to insinuate that people who have concerns over privacy live in fear.
Personally, for me, I would more enjoy living in a society where some people
are comfortable publicly sharing their identity.

~~~
rglullis
But your solution stops being effective at the slightest loss of control of
the data. Also, you can't control other people who might get access to it.

How does your public identity being tied to your "real self" helps you if some
random person decides to break into your house? How would you feel if people
you don't even know started shouting "Happy Birthday" to you on your birthday?
How would you feel if those same people started talking about those genital
warts you had to treat two years ago?

People will be comfortable sharing anything (identities, actions, personality
traits) as long as they feel they have control over who gets access to what is
being shared. I fail to see how anyone would feel comfortable sharing
_everything_ to _everyone_.

~~~
ahelwer
It's all fairly easy to manage if you don't take it to a logical extreme.

~~~
rglullis
I'd say the examples I gave are far, far from any logical extreme. TFA
mentions how just by crossing two (apparently) disparate networks, you get
people potentially being harassed by complete strangers.

All I'm trying to say is that I don't see how to reconcile the idea of having
a "public lifestyle" (i.e, let personal information be freely available to
anyone that bothers to go look for it) and being able to have a controlled
disclosure of personal data.

~~~
ahelwer
Well in my view, "sharing everything with everyone" reaches a vertex on the
continuum. Clearly I'm not putting stuff out there that I wouldn't tell to,
say, an acquaintance I met at a party.

You raised concerns over someone breaking into my house. I believe we want to
stay away from the "you should be afraid of people" argument.

So I suppose your concern is that I would rather some information I leak out
remain private. Sure. So what? Then you have to worry about things that you
wouldn't want an acquaintance at a party to know. What are those things, how
would they get online, how often, and what would the impact be? It's better
just not to worry in my opinion, instead of running around putting out fires
when a friend of yours on Facebook or Twitter publicly posts that it's your
birthday.

~~~
rglullis
I guess we are talking about different things. If you are analyzing what it is
what you disclose, and the consequences of it being out in the open, the
impact etc... then it's no longer a "public lifestyle", it's just that you
feel comfortable putting some information online when other people don't.
There is no argument to be made.

But the whole point about the OP that started this discussion of ours was not
about information that people are comfortable to share with people they trust.
It's about how people not realizing about the information leaking to people
they don't know. You seem to dismiss that with the idea that it's a false
sense of security. We could argue about that, but it's besides the point.

What I wanted to point out is that it's not just about security. It's about
_trust_. And trust does not with blacklisting post-facto. It works by
whitelisting prior known people. The people who got surprised by discovering
they were visible on some creepy website had to learn that the hard way.

------
jsm386
Article was recently updated: _After publication of this article, Laura
Covington, a Foursquare spokeswoman, said in statement: “This is a violation
of our API policy, so we’ve reached out to the developer and shut off their
API access.”_

~~~
rdtsc
> we’ve reached out to the developer and shut off their API access

That's sounds so ... I don't know ... PR-ish and passive aggressive. I always
thought "to reach out" means an attempt to help. In other words the one
reaching out has good intentions and intends to help the other party. So in
this instance, it is like saying "the police reached out to the family, killed
their dog and arrested everyone".

~~~
Joeboy
It's absolutely PR-ish, and it's a bit annoying that the update could leave
the naive reader with the impression that everything's been fixed when
actually what's happened is that the visibility of the problem has been
removed.

So far I've only once been threatened with being "reached out" to, by Oracle
after I tried to ask them about one of their products. I found the expression
vaguely sinister and was kind of relieved that they never actually got in
touch.

------
sanxiyn
This reminded me of a scene from Greg Egan's SF novel, Zendegi.
<http://gareth-rees.livejournal.com/31182.html>

You know AcTrack? It's a reality-mining plug-in that learns about academic
networking using physical proximity, along with email and calling patterns.
Last semester we put it on everyone's phones.

All right, so I'm running AcTrack. Is everyone else who's running AcTrack
appearing on Google Maps?

No, but you know Tinkle? It's a new femtoblogging service going through a beta
trial. Like microblogging, only snappier. It tells everyone in your network
where you are and how you're feeling, once a minute.

But why am I running it at all, and why is it telling complete strangers where
I am?

Oh, I doubt you're actually running a Tinkle client. But on the server side,
AcTrack and Tinkle are both application layers that run on a lower-level
platform called Murmur. It's possible that there's been some glitch with
Murmur -- maybe a server crash that was improperly recovered and ended up
corrupting some files. Tinkle does hook into Google Maps, and though it
shouldn't be putting anyone on the public database, if you don't belong to any
Tinkle Clan it might have inadvertently defaulted you to public.

------
yaix
How is /that/ suddenly "creepy"?

I find it creepy that people upload their complete lifes onto Facebook and
agree to be stalked 24/7 by Foursquare et al, even actively "checking in"
(never understood what for) to publicly broadcast every movement they make.

------
tryke
My priorities must be backwards. I'm almost as appalled that the app comes
with an "Energy" meter that is fueled by 99-cent in-app purchases.

------
dfc
How does this violate 4square's ToS? And how do you distinguish between this
app and "legitimate" apps.

~~~
akdotcom_
Hey dfc,

We have a policy against aggregating herenow information across venues using
our API, to use like this. You can see it clearly stated here in the
description for the endpoint:
<https://developer.foursquare.com/docs/venues/herenow>

We also prohibit using our API in any manner that is threatening, invasive of
another's privacy, or otherwise inappropriate.

As mentioned in another reply, we do also reserve the right to revoke access
to our API for any reason, at our sole discretion. That being said, we aim to
be consistent and transparent in our policies and how we enforce them.

Cheers,

~ak, platform evangelist @ foursquare

~~~
rbanffy
Thanks for the clarification. I felt this app very threatening, btw, and the
NYT article says you already revoked their API access.

------
klausa
How is this techically possible? I was under impression that foursquare
doesn't share your full public profile (including your twitter and/or
facebook) when you show up in 'x is also here:'. I get it how it can look up
girls that are nearby (scan for nearby 4sq venues, than if there are people in
them, filter for girls...), but how can it link back to Facebook (unless
you're friends with that person on 4sq and/or facebook, which makes whole
point of this app moot)?

~~~
toffer
I found it surprising too, but your impression is wrong.

When you query the Foursquare API for a user, Foursquare returns the user's
Facebook and Twitter names in their response (if the user has provided them to
Foursquare):

<https://developer.foursquare.com/docs/responses/user> (see the "contact"
field)

Once you have that, you just query Facebook and Twitter for their publicly
available profile, photos, likes, tweets, etc.

~~~
asmithmd1
The Foursquare API explorer is the best demo of an API I have ever seen:
<https://developer.foursquare.com/docs/explore>

------
ericd
Whelp, here comes privacy regulation. We were skating a fine line for a while,
but I think these guys might have just pushed it into a very concrete, scary-
for-normal-people-and-their-legislators territory.

------
Kevin_Marks
New app "Nerds Around Me" lets you stalk via Google+ checkins

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newman314
Maybe this will finally be a wakeup call to privacy.

Too many people do not take this stuff seriously and I'm now convinced that
people may only _start_ to do something about it when they start experiencing
fear over this. Hopefully, awareness over privacy will one day be taken with
the same seriousness as "Don't touch that fire, it will burn you".

------
eugenejen
Sign, maybe it is better apologize later than asking for permissions first.

My company hotlist.com was thinking about similar User Interface as "Grils
Around Me" for Hotlist.com on 2008, but we think it was too creepy for users
to accept it. Even we just show your acquaintances from Facebook and people
already feel uncomfortable about being followed implicitly and we spend a lot
of efforts listening to users in user testings to make them feel comfortable.

Well, if you like to see where to go and see what kind of crowd in the
location, you can come to check hotlist.com out. And if you like it and have
suggestions, please do send us feedback. Thank you so much.

------
daenz
If only it wasn't a TOS violation of Foursquare and/or Facebook's API, then
maybe people might actually care about their privacy.

------
suyash
creepy but solving a real problem, easier to find the women you wanna meet
around :P

------
joshfraser
Public is public. I just assume that any public data I have will be indexed,
correlated, searched and used for all sorts of things I didn't intend.

------
rbanffy
The Sex Offender Association is calling them "App of the Year"

The next version will correlate profiles from different networks using face-
recognition and offer insights on usual itineraries based not only in
geotagging of posts but also picture background analysis.

This app is a _very_ bad idea.

Note to downvoters: if you disagree with this assessment, by all means, say
why.

~~~
Dylan16807
I didn't feel the need to downvote you but I think the reason is pretty clear.
You're making an unhelpful and not very clever joke, and then making up a
future 'version' of the app for no discernible reason.

~~~
rbanffy
I think the idea was to highlight the most obvious use for apps like this. The
very idea of how easily one could be made by connecting easily available
information such as Foursquare checkins, Facebook profiles, tweets, Instagram
photos, all neatly tagged with addresses and geographic coordinates allows
anyone with such disturbing inclinations to piece together a fairly accurate
picture of whoever they want. This app offers a nice menu of easy targets.

------
jshintaku
Isn't it also sexist? And by default cutting out a large sector of the
market...

~~~
kaybe
You can also make it search for guys. But you're right, the default (as also
given in the name) is women. (It says so in the article.)

~~~
rbanffy
I never met a girl who would seriously use an app like this. And I have met my
share of crazy stalkers.

~~~
quellhorst
That is because hot girls are constantly hit on by guys.

------
falling
Non creepy version? [http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/where-the-ladies-
at/id4156024...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/where-the-ladies-
at/id415602400?mt=8)

------
J3L2404
The In-App purchase to recharge the service is frightfully ingenious.

------
cbp
People wont learn till kidnappings start happening.

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quellhorst
The female version of this app would be the sugar daddy locator app. Where
annual income is tied to Foursquare checkins.

