I'm surprised that the author didn't censor the faces of the Loopt users or at least the person who messaged him. People opt-in to the service but do they give away all their rights to privacy? Do people who opt-in agree not to publish the photos of other users?
If you push a piece of information into the public sphere, it's public information. The only way it would be private is if they made every Loopt user sign an NDA, or something similar, about never disclosing anything they see while using the service.
You should have a full expectation of nothing but the highest level of privacy when you are on a service that GPS tracks you wherever you go and allows you to publicly view everyone in a given radius. Not only that, but you should also expect these strangers to be absolutely discreet when you proceed to brashly proposition your entire radius for sex.
Let's also take this online example to a similar public gathering in a small radius -- a party, where you proceed to ask roughly half the people at the party to hook-up later that night. You would definitely expect every individual to maintain the highest level of confidentiality in that scenario.
Disagree. You might hope that those individuals maintain the highest level of confidentiality, but you've got to realize when you start asking that many people, some of them are bound to start talking.
Isn't this specifically a 'hook-up' service portion of Loopt? Assume for example this scenario:
You're on dating site, which is mostly heterosexual. There's a lesbian woman on there, you don't immediately notice that her profile says "interested in: women" and message her and she then posts your picture and the message you sent (which may have been a cheesy pick-up line) for everyone to read. Would you like that?
It also seems far from certain that this was a "hookup." I go to "meetups" and talk to mostly men. Does this make me gay AND soliciting? (the answers are NO and NO, just to be extra clear!)
I think the hookup clue was "You wanna hang out later at my place?" I go to meetups and talk to mostly men too. But they tend not to invite me back to their apartment before we've met, though.
