The Girls Around Me App Takes Creepy to a New Level

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/30/girls-around-me-ios-app-takes-creepy-to-a-new-level/

by rvcamo • 14 years ago

142 92 14 years ago

bits.blogs.nytimes.com

sp3322• 14 years ago

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.

rvcamo• 14 years ago

I agree. I mean this is the reason I don't use Foursquare. Why on earth would I tell the entire Internet where I am and where I've been....

samstave• 14 years ago

Looks like you just might have something to hide.

jes51992• 14 years ago

Why wouldn't I tell the internet where I am? It's not really a compromising piece of information. (For example: Right now I'm in an office building at 5th and Mission, in San Francisco!) I know that some people have a safety need to stay more hidden than I do, and we should continue to make it possible for them to stay unmapped. But for the average person: I don't think their physical location is that significant or dangerous.

Zirro• 14 years ago

"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.

dwc• 14 years ago

Normal people are used to having the luxury of being very open about almost every facet of their lives and not having to worry about it biting them. The privacy paranoids have largely been, well, paranoid. This has been changing over the past decade or so, but most people still don't believe it. Not really. Apps like this will change public perception, and have a backlash against permissive default privacy policies. At least I hope so.

ahelwer4• 14 years ago

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.

route66• 14 years ago

I would say that most users of these kind of applications do not even dream of the consequences of the combination of the data the make available. It needs geek mentality and more algorithmic thinking then you would expect to realize this.

You could even try to reconstruct foursquare locations of people who are not on FS just by their FB buddies ... try to explain that to "normal people".

And isn't it a bit scary that you seem to need more and more caution as time goes by? Would we need more responsibility on the side of the makers or do we keep blaming "normal people" for the world we create? (like we do it with, let's say, their inability to maintain secure passwords?)

sp3322• 14 years ago

In "real life", all I have to do is take a quick glance at the people around me, and I'll get an impression of how "safe" the personal information is that I'm sharing. It's a lot harder on the internet! Especially on Facebook, when you feel like you're talking to friends, it's hard to remember that the whole internet is listening.

jaylevitt• 14 years ago

Because rationality is a myth; we are mammals with language skills. Evolution has taught us that only things in the here and now can hurt us, and decisions we made (or really, failed to make by accepting defaults) last year are harmless.

vellum• 14 years ago

The average user doesn't think about edge cases when using new internet services.

Kaizyn• 14 years ago

Psychologists found a while ago that people are more open and less inhibited when technology mediates their interactions with other people. This same effect probably carries over to providing personal data to online services. Somehow it doesn't quite feel like sharing with the world when you are only making an update on your phone.

bproper• 14 years ago

Totally agree. This app shows you people who made public checkins on foursquare and then connects you to whatever profile they display publicly on Facebook. This is yellow journalism. Let's focus on real privacy violations.

burgerbrain• 14 years ago

Do victims of this feel like they had their privacy violated? If yes (and I strongly suspect the answer you will receive in a non-trivial number of cases is yes), than this is as real a privacy violation as they get.

kmfrk2• 14 years ago

    This app just shows what we've known, or should have known (...)

Exactly. I liken this app to Firesheep[1][2] for social and privacy (The Girls Around Me : Privacy :: Firesheep : Security). We're over warning people about the dangers of data leakages; now it's time to show them the consequences and scare them to consider whether it's worth the trade-off. Moving from telling to showing.

[1] http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/10/firesheep.html

[2] http://money.cnn.com/2010/12/14/technology/firesheep_starbuc...

dfc6• 14 years ago

"We're over warning people about the dangers of data leakages;" ???

Isn't this an example that "we" are not over warning people?

jshintaku3• 14 years ago

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

kaybe• 14 years ago

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.)

jshintaku3• 14 years ago

I wonder if someone has ever tried to quantify the bump you get from a "shock value" strategy for an app like this i.e increased press and people talking about your app. I would like to see it measured against taking a more general approach such as what the Sonar app did. I wonder if the gain in customers from a more measured marketing pitch would outweigh the increased chatter you get from something as blunt as "girls around me". Any thoughts? Does the old adage any publicity is good publicity still apply in the digital world?

rbanffy4• 14 years ago

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

ionforce• 14 years ago

If you are the one to search for guys online, you probably are part of a self-selecting group and you already know what the answer for that is.

But I agree, it's sexist. We should all have the opportunity to be creeped on.

Lockyy• 14 years ago

I see what you are trying to say. But surely this is sexist in the same way as only looking for girls at a bar is sexist. I.E. Not sexist at all. Especially considering the app has a male search setting, but is off by default.

I agree that this app is horrifying, and creepy as all hell. But I would love to be enlightened as to its sexist nature.

jshintaku3• 14 years ago

I was mostly commenting on the old adage that in business you want to offend the least amount of customers to increase your market share e.g. the reason why mainstream news is so bland is that it helps to sell advertisements.

I was leaning towards calling it sexist because it by default chooses one gender over the other and has in its name a specific judgement on gender. "Girls around me" It could have been like Sonar and chosen the "networking" approach and named itself "People around me" and by default shown both men and women.

Perhaps they are like the Fox News of apps and are trying to target a very specific segment of the market i.e. creeps?

dfc6• 14 years ago

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

jeltz• 14 years ago

It made bad press for 4square. I bet that is the only difference between this and legitimate users.

jes51992• 14 years ago

I read the policy - https://foursquare.com/legal/api/platformpolicy and I can't figure out the objection. Plus, all of the information mentioned in the article (who's at location A? what's their facebook profile?) is visible on foursquare.com !

dfc6• 14 years ago

I checked it too and could not find anything. I also looked at the individual ToS and wonder if incorporating the "house rules" has anything to do with it...

ojbyrne• 14 years ago

"Foursquare may revoke your authentication credentials at any time, for any reason or no reason, with or without notice, and without liability to you or any other person"

Sort of ... if you follow every single one of our rules to the letter, we still reserve the right to revoke your access because we just don't like you.

akdotcom_• 14 years ago

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

dfc6• 14 years ago

Thanks for the response. I wish I could upvote you five times..

rbanffy4• 14 years ago

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

daenz• 14 years ago

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

tryke• 14 years ago

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.

rbanffy4• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

rbanffy4• 14 years ago

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.

klausa3• 14 years ago

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)?

newman3144• 14 years ago

Given 2 public social graphs (FB and 4sq), I'm sure it is not hard of an exercise to cross reference that information. It really is more of a data-mapping exercise using 2 APIs.

That's why freely adding lots of personal information is a bad idea.

Much as there are tools like 1Password for passwords, I think there should be like tools for usernames/emails.

This would then return some control back to the user.

klausa3• 14 years ago

But how would you cross reference it? From my usage of 4sq (which is limited, I only installed it maybe week ago.), when you check in to venue, and someone else is already there, you get "There are 3 persons already there!", with their avatars. You can tap on those avatars, and see some more info (John D., maybe some bio? I'm not sure, I do know that it doesn't give you their full name.), but I don't think that would be enough to cross match those. That's why I'm curious.

dfc6• 14 years ago

"Much as there are tools like 1Password for passwords, I think there should be like tools for usernames/emails."

The way I read that is an aggregator for usernames. How would that help anything?

Or do you mean I change my username to a different sha1 string for each website? That seems like it would definitely hurt the social aspect of a lot of websites...

"2fd4e1c67a2d28fced849ee1bb76e7391b93eb12 just checked in at Alice and Bob's Bar"

toffer• 14 years ago

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.

klausa3• 14 years ago

That would explain it, thanks.

It seems it actually links to your facebook/twitter from your profile page, at least it does on webapp, I'm not sure how it is on mobile.

I think that's wrong default and should be changed.

asmithmd1• 14 years ago

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

newman3144• 14 years ago

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".

suyash• 14 years ago

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

eugenejen• 14 years ago

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.

jsm386• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

> 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• 14 years ago

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.

zerostar07• 14 years ago

Curious to find out in which way this app was breaking their API policy.

ericd• 14 years ago

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.

quellhorst2• 14 years ago

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

Kevin_Marks• 14 years ago

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

cbp• 14 years ago

People wont learn till kidnappings start happening.

falling• 14 years ago

Non creepy version? http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/where-the-ladies-at/id4156024...

sanxiyn• 14 years ago

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.

joshfraser• 14 years ago

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.

yaix• 14 years ago

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.

J3L2404• 14 years ago

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

The Girls Around Me App Takes Creepy to a New Level

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