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.<p>Odd that whoever wrote the headline decided to directly contradict the author's conclusion at the bottom: this isn't anything new.
Article was recently updated:
<i>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.”</i>
This reminded me of a scene from Greg Egan's SF novel, Zendegi.
<a href="http://gareth-rees.livejournal.com/31182.html" rel="nofollow">http://gareth-rees.livejournal.com/31182.html</a><p>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.<p>All right, so I'm running AcTrack. Is everyone else who's running AcTrack appearing on Google Maps?<p>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.<p>But why am I running it at all, and why is it telling complete strangers where I am?<p>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.
How is /that/ suddenly "creepy"?<p>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.
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)?
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.
Maybe this will finally be a wakeup call to privacy.<p>Too many people do not take this stuff seriously and I'm now convinced that people may only <i>start</i> 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".
Sign, maybe it is better apologize later than asking for permissions first.<p>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.<p>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.
The Sex Offender Association is calling them "App of the Year"<p>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.<p>This app is a <i>very</i> bad idea.<p>Note to downvoters: if you disagree with this assessment, by all means, say why.