I've always been skeeved out by the location sharing services; why do I want everybody to know where I am and what I'm doing? Perhaps this is generational (I'm almost 40) as almost everybody I know younger than myself happily checks in via Foursquare or Facebook, but the comment I had upon seeing the initial Loopt demo ("so now my boss can follow me around wherever I go?") retains.
It could be generational, or it could be incipient crazy-person behavior (always a possibility with me). I'm not going to try and unpack that myself; until it causes me drama, I'll just steer clear of anything that broadcasts my location.
The answer (at least as I see it) is that in isolation each of these particular items don't carry much meaning. But in aggregate, if I'm a friend of yours I can get a lot of value out of your twitter stream. It's a quick and easy way to keep up with the random comings & goings of your life. It's an easy way for you to share these things with your circle of friends.
It's the same thing with where you are and what you're doing. Maybe you check in at a fancy restaurant and then someone sends you a quick text telling you that a particular dish is a must order. Maybe you check in at the movies saying you're seeing the new James Bond and then someone asks you about it the next day. Maybe you check in at a bar after work and a friend you haven't seen in a while stops by to say hello. Each checkin (like a tweet) is a small look into your life that you've chosen to share with your friends. Individually, they aren't so useful, but in aggregate it adds up.
And it gets even bigger if you are part of a medium to large sized community of people all using foursquare. I like to tell people it's a little bit like telepathy. Foursquare lets me know that when my buddies get tired and go home, I can pop over the the place a couple blocks over and meet up with another crew over there. Foursquare gives me a snapshot of nearly everything going on in my "social universe" right now. It makes it easier to connect, more often, with all of my friends.
Everybody has a different threshold at which sharing information becomes uncomfortable, and I posit that this threshold is partly a function of what their social network is doing. My social network, as I said, largely doesn't use Foursquare, so it sits on the "creepy oversharing" side of the threshold for me.
I don't think it's evil, but I'm not interested in joining up.
I don't think it's generational, you're old enough to be my father (sorry!) and I too share the same indifference towards them. I think it's a personal thing or maybe it's based on a persons social circle. For some people where socialising is their life it makes sense for them to share where they are when they're there, it allows friends (assuming they "follow" these people) to know "oh hey, they're at x I can join them!"
I'm not a social person who wants people to come join me when I'm buying stuff in real life and I'm sure you're not either, but there are people from every generation who are.
I don't believe it's just generational, but culture plays an important role in it. If a person's friends are over-sharers, chances are they themselves might be, too.
Personally, I never saw the advantage of location sharing. I like to know what my friends are up to and I like telling them what I'm doing, and there are many tools and sites for doing that. Why do people have to give their geo coordinates to some creepy service when they could just post "hey, i'm at pizza hut, everybody" on Twitter if the need arises?
I think you're right about culture; also, there is a strong network effect to these services. The more your social circle uses them, the more benefit you will see from them. It's safe to say that my crowd just doesn't run with the over-sharing.
Why do people have to give their geo coordinates to some creepy service when they could just post "hey, i'm at pizza hut, everybody" on Twitter if the need arises?
actually that is a benefit. your friends know which Pizza Hut you are referring to. no one else necessarily knows what country/state/city you're in (this may be pieceable together from other things you say, but that's quite different than easy lng/lat)
Foursquare should not define location sharing. Foursquare is simple one example of it and probably not even the most popular one since Facebook came out with Places. Places for the most part is pretty private. I'm on Places but not on Facebook. I love sharing my location!
My 50+ Mom LOVES that she can keep tabs on where her sons and daughter are even as they are spread out across the country!
Location-based stuff is exactly why my mom got on facebook. It's actually useful to her and makes us all feel more connected.
Of course there are privacy issues when anything revolutionary comes around. Overtime they are taken care of--partly with technology and partly with best-use practices.
I wouldn't derive any particular benefit from FourSquare if I used it, as my movement from place to place is fairly routine and predictable. However, I don't think there would really be any drawbacks if you, me, or anyone else was simply GPS-tagged and stuck in a public-queriable database.
Think about this: whenever you go out in public, there are people you don't know all around you watching everything you do, and any of them could choose to stalk you in the literal, physical sense, following you from place to place without your knowledge. Putting your location online just helps people that already care about you to find you; it doesn't increase the probability that someone who doesn't care will arbitrarily start caring (in either a beneficial or malicious sense.)
Internet location publishing just makes getting information more convenient. Nothing that was previously impossible is now possible; the barrier to entry for some things (like stalking) has just been lowered, so that people can do it without investing their whole day in casually hiding in a crowd nearby you.
So you think we should lower the barrier for all discomforting and potentially infringing activities? Your movements today might be fairly routine and predictable, but would you be comfortable in a database flagging every single day where you broke that routine for whatever reason? What if your reasons for doing that were very personal--say you needed to see a therapist, or a doctor, or a lawyer, or a friend in a crisis, etc.
Keeping barriers up for potential mass infringements of privacy may be a good thing. In a digital age, isn't the anonymity of a crowd the only privacy we have left?
That something is possible at great effort is no argument to lower the amount of effort to do it. Do you have locks on your front door?
i've convinced 40 year old adults to use foursquare and loopt because of the money they can save by redeeming the in-game coupons (these people are now #1 on my leader boards). it's actually fun if you try it out, although i didn't get truly hooked until i started traveling around a bit more.
This is the exact reason I never even opened an account.
It's super creepy (I'm a just-turned-30 y.o. woman and have dealt with these sorts of creepy people even without foursquare). People who need to know where I am know where I am, or know how to find out where I am. I never understood the appeal.
I haven't wont ever create an account. I'm 25 and as eager to jump on the next cool thing as the next guy, but I just cant fathom how this would be of any use for me. Why would I want people to know where I am? If I wanted to meet with friends I can just send them a group/broadcast message and ask who wants to meet up. I can choose whom I want to meet up with and who I don't want to provide my current location to that easy. I enjoy social media and sharing to an extent, but this type of sharing just leads to creepy situations like the ones in the the article.
My thoughts too - if it wasn't Foursquare it'd be whatever other service they chose to use.
What's up with the comments on that entry as well? Feels like people are commenting to promote their own stuff; it's horrible.
[edit] Just checked out the Carrissa O'Brien twitter link - and her latest tweet has her location in it...
Edit: I'd like to preface this by saying that I've never used Foursquare, or any service like this.
Then what is the point? My take away is probably not what it's supposed to be: that people really don't care about privacy until after they've had it violated and then cry about how their privacy has been taken.
I mean, if we take the article for what it says, the weird person is Shea. She's the odd one. She's the strange one. She's sharing her information with strangers, and when a stranger contacts her, she gets scared. I mean, what did he say that was creepy? Nothing. Oh, sure, the situation was creepy. But it was her doing.
She's broadcasting her where-abouts to the world. Someone picks up on that, contacts her, and asks about hanging out. She get's creeped out. He notices and asks. He then advises her not to do what she did.
I'm not heartless. She was frightened. Fine. And the resulting comments seemed excessively harsh. But really, if you're communicating information about yourself to the public, expect communication to actually occur.
I never really saw the point. I suppose if you have a high friend density in your location, it might be more useful. On a college campus, for instance.
If your friends and coworkers are widely scattered through several towns, so even if you post your location nobody's likely to be nearby, then it's really kinda pointless.
It seems like this would be a good candidate for a peer-to-peer implementation. Send the data directly to your friends' devices, without a central repository or way for other people to check.
Of course, then you probably lose many of the marketing possibilities.
I created an account because all my friends were doing it. However, I always felt deep down that it was weird and potentially dangerous sharing your location with the rest of the world. After reading this article I asked myself, "Do I care where my friends are? Do I want to share my location with others?" I answered "NO" to both questions and deleted my account.
I don't use it, but it sounds like Facebook regarding default settings are more open than closed... which is great for Foursquare and bad for a general user that never checks that.
I won't speak for facebook but we REALLY DO spend a lot of time thinking about our privacy settings on foursquare, and we try very hard to balance a "as secure as possibly by default" vs a "as useful as possible by default" model while at the same time trying to make the options as easy to understand as possible for our users. If there's any specific way you think we might be able to improve I'd be very interested in hearing it.
The real question is why any of these people signed up for Foursquare in the first place. Foursquare is great for people who want to share their location, not so great (surprise!) for people who don't. If you don't want the risks and benefits together, don't sign up.
This is nothing new. Crazy people can be anywhere; they can follow you around, or simply be at your location. The Internet doesn't make this different, it just makes it slightly easier to target a specific individual. But Foursquare, unlike "real life", you can control. You can fake check-ins. You can simply not check in. But when someone is following you around in real life, there is nothing you can do, except maybe get a fake mustache.
Are this the same with other services like Gowalla? Cos anyone can make the jump from Foursquare easily.
Both services can post to Facebook anyways, so if it's for the same reason of telling people where you are, why are people still sticking on Foursquare?
The weirdest thing I had happen so far was checking in (on Gowalla) at a restaurant while on vacation and seeing a checkin from the same guy that had also recently checked into our hotel. For a minute I thought it was a weird coincidence, but then I looked at all his recent checkins and he'd been checking into every single spot up and down the beach, about 30 in the past hour. The weird part is that he was actually in the restaurant. I almost said something to him about being an item-hunting scammer, but I let it go.
It's weird how accustomed we've become to anonymity in modern times. Less than a hundred years ago, most people rarely went anywhere without being surrounded by people that knew them. There are still plenty of places where you could go walk into a bar on a Saturday night and 90% of the people know each other.
I almost said something to him about being an item-hunting scammer, but I let it go.
It's weird how accustomed we've become to anonymity in modern times.
What's really weird is how emotional people get about how other people spend their time. "Scammer" because he's been to 30 restaurants? Who the fuck cares!?
I didn't get all emotional about a guy gaming Gowalla. I wasn't about to go drop an f-bomb on him and his family, but I did come close to joking with him about it.
I was just commenting that it was weird to actually see a guy that does hundreds of driveby automated checkins a day actually inside the place he checked into.
Foursquare comes out of the idea of playing virtual games out in the every day world. What happens often when people are playing a game is someone gets hurt and then the fun is ruined for everyone.
You know what's silly about this story? You can A) Not include your phone number or B) Only friend people that you consider your friend and know personally. Seems like a non-issue to me.
The 'cyberstalker' in the article called the woman on the restaurant's telphone, not her telephone. Also, the default privacy settings on Foursquare allow users who aren't your 'friends' to discover when you've checked in somewhere via the 'mayor' and 'who's here' features.
It could be generational, or it could be incipient crazy-person behavior (always a possibility with me). I'm not going to try and unpack that myself; until it causes me drama, I'll just steer clear of anything that broadcasts my location.