Stomach-turning geo app shamelessly designed to help stalkers prey on "girls"
cultofmac.comNobody is going to take these issues seriously until there is some emotional sting.
We've known for years about the uses of Big Data (good and bad), and people still cheerfully fork over mining rights of their life story to third parties to click cows and exchange pictures.
Frankly, link-bait titles and apps like this are the only way the majority of folks are ever going to figure out that, hey, maybe this isn't such a hot idea.
The majority of folks? I don't think so, an actual majority of people in the US won't be aware of this kind of stuff until some psycho stalks and kills someone and they find something like this on his phone.
I mean, it will happen sooner or later, same number of violent psychopaths out there as always. The media will love the cyber-stalker angle too, just like Columbine was used to push the Violent Video Games Ruin Children meme.
An app like this makes a better target for public outrage than facebook or another big player too, so they'll probably take the brunt of the 24 hour news cycle outrage. Especially since the big players have a prepared coordinated PR response ready to go already.
I am saddened by the fact that I cannot disagree with your assessment.
If firesheep had made a bigger splash among non-tech people I would have hoped that these kinds of super creepy examples would have pushed the problem into the public consciousness.
There was so little awareness raised outside techie circles by such a perfect demonstration that I've arrived at this particularily depressing opinion of what it will take.
I hope I'm just being pessimistic and not realistic.
It's a good article, but the title given here is too emotional and link-baity.
(The original title being 'This Creepy App Isn’t Just Stalking Women Without Their Knowledge, It’s A Wake-Up Call About Facebook Privacy')
I disagree with the comments indicating that the title is too emotional. I think it needs to be whatever it has to be in order to bring eyeballs to this issue. None-techies have no idea of what is possible when they sign-on to and use various social networks and tools. Because of this they, almost invariably, end-up horribly exposed in very public ways. Articles such as this one need to appeal to emotion and, hopefully, go viral, in order to have non-tech folks understand, protect themselves and their kids.
It's like folks that apply decals with the names of their kids on the back of their SUV's. I've never understood why someone would do something that stupid. In some cases they even go as far as also providing clues as to what they are into. The most common example of this is having the Christian ichthus (fish) symbol under their names.
I struck-up a conversation with one such parents at the local school our kids attend during an open house event. I explained just how much I knew about their kids by making a number of inferences from the very public access they were providing through these seemingly innocent little stickers on the back of the SUV. It wasn't hard at all to demonstrate just how bad an idea this was. They thanked me and went out to the parking lot to remove the stickers right away.
I don't like to think ill of people and I generally don't (and have scars to prove it). This does not mean that one has to provide all the necessary tools and information to facilitate becoming a victim.
It's not about the original title [1] which is somewhat ok, especially considering your point, but about the HN title. Regarding the topic, it's preaching to the choir; and yet the HN title is over-the-top emotional and accusing of the app's creators 'shamelessly' helping 'stalkers prey', where the article does no such thing.
[1]This Creepy App Isn’t Just Stalking Women Without Their Knowledge, It’s A Wake-Up Call About Facebook Privacy
It is a creepy app that exposes folks publicly available data, but I think the idea that it is designed to help stalkers prey on girls is a stretch.
"Stalker", to me, implies a certain degree of obsession with a particular person. This app is much less discriminating than that- maybe a good tool for a conman, though.
It exposes only women's data -- and the app's logo is a naked woman in a stripper pose with crosshairs on top. To me, that makes me think of assault and/or rape.
The article is quite clear that it exposes anyone's data that uses facebook and foursquare, not just women.
Mmm, missed that, thanks. Doesn't change the aggression against women in the marketing, though. Though maybe thanks to our culture (violent video games, for example) we've been de-sensitized to this?
If the logo is the same as the splash screen, there are no crosshairs on the woman. That's the radar, which seems to imply targeting or finding, rather than attacking. So I would agree with duxup that it's a bit of a stretch to say it's designed for stalkers, or that it implies assault/rape.
In fact, I think it's a good thing that such an app exists. The bad thing is people not knowing what they share, and that needs to be fixed by Facebook/Google, or through laws. The situation is not that much different from exposing a security hole in order to get it fixed. Besides, some people may actually want their data to be available like this, so once it's strictly opt-in, there's nothing wrong with the app.
Though you could think of it that way, I think it's more likely that sex sells, and the creator of this app thought that putting sexy silhouettes on his app would rake in the users.
Facebook (and now Google) have adopted the policy of share by default, which makes it not only easy to share things by mistake, but encourages users to be naive about what can be seen by whom.
It's like a maze covered in mirrors intended to result in accidental oversharing... and in dopamine created in the brains of people who have some minimal curiosity about the individuals whose actions are being revealed and who might click on an ad.
I think it's just a matter of time before people realize this. Sadly, the process will leave Facebook and Google mistrusted (if not hated) by users.
Just as an accidental purchase of a song on iTunes earns Apple a dollar of revenue, the accidental overshare of information (due to confusing privacy policies and settings) earn Facebook and Google lots of ad clicks.
Imagine users dumb enough to think that the $50 in songs they accidentally purchased from the iTunes store due to an intentionally confusing link or button were no big deal, etc. Soon enough users will wise up and realize that these accidental-overshare business models are ultimately dishonest and abuse the trust of users.
Welcome to the brave new world. You can single out this app but it does not matter - once the data is out there, it's going to be used this way. Most people do not understand participating in social networks means broadcasting your private life to the whole green world. This is a very new thing - you never before had an option to do that even if you wanted. So there are no common sense rules about it, and mothers can't teach their children to behave right on Facebook - because nobody has enough experience with that stuff yet. And unfortunately, I foresee a number of creepy and outright evil things happening before this common sense emerges and becomes part of the collective wisdom. It's much bigger than any single app, that app is only a tiny symptom.
In case you didn't read until the end, Foursquare has terminated the app's API access for violating their venue aggregation policy: http://www.cultofmac.com/157793/foursquare-kills-api-access-...
Haven't they missed the point, which was that users are happy to share too much information, and part of that is because privacy controls are different across all networks and are hard to find and change.
EDIT: Sorry, that's an awful sentence.
Privacy matters will only get worse and worse. At the end of the day, we are actually buying perfect snooping devices (cam, mic, gps) and wearing them 24/7. With our own money. And for the benefit of others, strangers or institutions.
So let me see if this makes sense. This article is talking about how stomach turning and skin crawling Girls Around Me is. To demonstrate this, the author writes a wordy, boring blog post in the style of a short story and posts pictures of the same poor girls that show up in the app without their permission or knowledge, then has the balls to call the creators of the app villains.
He calls the people who use this app creeps and stalkers, yet he downloads it, shows it to a table of his friends, then writes about it. Comes off as a completely hypocritical white knight.
I got a different take from the post.
He does take a long time to get to the point, but I don't think that he is trying to criticize the app authors, or Apple, he's trying to make a point about how Facebook and FourSquare make it too easy to over share personal information.
If the information is available via public APIs then anyone could write the App, I think the author is trying to point out that people need to be educated about what the possible consequences of their facebook (et. al.) privacy settings are.
Using this app as a vivid demonstration is quite likely far more effective than a technical or ideological rant about privacy.
He calls the people who use this app creeps and stalkers, yet he downloads it, shows it to a table of his friends, then writes about it. Comes off as a completely hypocritical white knight.
Wow! He downloaded an app and then showed it to people before writing about it. What exactly is hypocritical about that? I agree that the tone of the article is a little strange and posting photos of the women was unnecessary, but I don't see how downloading an application and showing it to people makes him a hypocrite.
If you read his conclusion (I know, that's a lot of words down there, but do try to manage the slog!) you see that he advocates downloading the app and showing it off to people to help them realize what's going on.
Where did you get the "white knight" business from?
Please, read the whole article before commenting.
>So I’m writing about it now. Not because Girls Around Me is an evil app that should be pulled from the iOS App Store, or because the company that makes it — Moscow-based i-Free — is filled with villains. I still don’t believe that there’s anything wrong with what this app is doing, and the guys at i-Free are super nice, and certainly don’t mean for this app to be anything beyond a diversion.
If you have read this, then you misunderstood him completely. He very clearly states that the creators of the app are not villains.