I think the author makes a very very important point. The entire issue needs to be viewed from the perspective that a user is <i>not</i> equal to his data. Every facebook user shares his/her information with varying intents and motivation. People maintain a fairly public facebook profile say for potential employers, old friends etc.<p>We are NOT as privacy-illiterate as we are made out to be in recent articles about <i>Girls around me</i>. For instance, I recently applied to YC and enlisted my Facebook profile. And, I have been posting a lot of public content with that very intention in mind for months now.<p>I came across another instance of this when I was trying to "teach" my sister the importance of heightened privacy. She plainly refused as she often needs to plan open events and she needs to put up a lot of her information public.<p>We need to understand that just as you cannot ask women not to go out for fear of stalkers, you cannot ask people not to share information publicly. In fact, we need to keep up with the shift in social media to increase law-enforcement. <i>Girls Around Me</i> is a clear violation of the intention with which millions share their information publicly.<p>I think we need to standardize and associate <i>User Intents</i> as a first class attribute to a user's data. And find and penalize miscreants like <i>Girls Around Me</i> who violate the intention associated with people's information.
> Because to me there are two perpetrators in situations like these. Those who committed the crime, obviously, but also those who make apps like Girls Around Me<p>I have no moral problem with considering the Girls Around Me devs to be at fault, but in practice it's like getting angry with individual spammers. It's futile. Pretty soon others will leap onto the publicity created by the furore and create something functionally equivalent. It seems to me the practical approaches to improving the situation are a) Embarrass Foursquare, Facebook et al into not sharing the info, b) Educate people into being more careful what they put online or c) Work on alternative social networking infrastructure that's more respectful of people's privacy. Whether or not we get upset at the Girls Around Me people is just a distraction.
Read through this twice and still don't get the point he's trying to make.<p>Nothing I've read about the Girls Around Me coverage treats the women in a patronizing tone. If anything the question is more along the lines of "D'you think they <i>know</i> this can happen? Can it happen with <i>my</i> info?"<p>Sure, you can point the finger at the app developers but there's a certain amount of personal awareness and <i>responsibility</i> that people need to develop. Social-sharing is moving faster than most people are able to comprehend. Anything that encourages discussion is a good and useful thing in my view
>> But when I hear people proclaim the importance of educating these presumably ignorant young women about the dangers of Facebook, it is just a little too close to comfort to those seeking to educate women about the dangers of hemlines that end above the knee.<p>People <i>do</i> need to be educated about the implications of using social services on the internet. It's our responsibility as consumers and citizens to know what we are getting ourselves into.<p>Mind you, this doesn't just apply to women - but the safety concerns <i>are</i> greater than for men. No amount of moralistic hand-wringing will change the fact that a woman faces a slew of security challenges that men rarely even contemplate.
I don't get how they are perceived as victims in this case. It would require some harm to come to them and in that case it didn't matter is some app was involved or not.<p>The harm would matter and guess what, we already have laws for that. It doesn't matter whether you killed a guy with your car, a gun, a bow, an axe, a piece of wood or you computer. What you will be punished for is killing him.<p>And there is no blame here. Only consequences. If you share your information it may be used by third-parties for purposes that you don't much like. If you jump out of a 3th floor window, you may die. We don't have a problem with telling people that they shouldn't jump out of buildings.<p>Stating that there is likely to be some consequence for a particular action -- whether it is going down to the shady side of town, running in an old abandoned building or eating twenty pizzas a week -- doesn't mean blaming the people involved. A rape victim doesn't deserve being raped, but the chances are higher if she is in a particular place.
The truth of the matter is all of us are far more risk from the people we know than the people we don't.<p>If you don't like this app and don't like the people behind it, stop making sure that every person who might be interested in it hears about it so they can add it to their phone. I wonder how much bank the devs are making from all this free press.<p>Maybe there are muggers and robbers and stalkers looking for me on this app, I'm not going to think about it for more than a half second. You should really fear getting cancer, or getting in a car accident, or even getting the flu, not being accosted by random people from the internet. Random people from the internet is not a statistically significant source of crime or harm to people, and this app isn't going to do anything to change that.