Geolocation Has Become A Stalker’s Dream

Back in 2010 when Tom Scott presented a nightmare version of a flash mob gone wrong, it was greeted with rueful awareness that events could coalesce to a dangerous point. The message, that oversharing through social media can have real life consequences, is still being shouted from websites.

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In one of the more bizarre and disturbing examples I’ve seen, an article by John Brownlee on Cult of Mac shows how linking Facebook and Foursquare can allow people to become prime and ready victims of stalkers. An app called Girls Around Me uses geolocation to map who is around you, like many other apps. The difference is that Girls Around Me geolocates people with public Facebook profiles and lists them on a map. Click on the spot you want, find a person who interests you, and scroll that person’s  profile. As Brownlee points out in his piece, strangers can find out a lot about someone and create an artificially shared history.

As of this writing, the app has been pulled, but it could come back in a tweaked version that only allows users to search one area at a time.

Brownlee points out that Foursquare and Facebook rely on people not worrying about their privacy, and in pulling the app, the conversations gets cut off. I refuse to use Foursquare because I’m a mom, and I’m already paranoid about privacy issues and strangers. And also I got really pissed when my husband checked us in at a hospital a week before I gave birth, prompting a lot of emails and phone calls from people who never should have known we were there. I do use Facebook, to my ever-lasting shame, and as tech-savvy as I am, I still haven’t fully figured out how to lock down my information. Cult of Mac put together a great guide to protecting your information. Check it out and pass it on. If people are vulnerable on the internet, it should be by choice and not because they didn’t understand how to reset defaults.