A dating app called Girls Around Me has hit the news last month, and not in a good way.
According to Macworld magazine, its makers have been under fire for helping men stalk unsuspecting women at bars and other public places because of how it collects and shares information from social networks. The way it works is that the app collects information from women checking in on FourSquare, and combines that with Facebook data. Then men who downloaded the app were then able to see how many single women were at a particular nightspot, along with their names and what they looked like. The women didn't know that the information they shared over their social networks was being distributed in such a way. There's no "opt in" requirement for the app. So the men who have downloaded it can look around the room and find the women suggested to them by the app, and make their approach.
FourSquare forced the app's developer to pull the app from the iTunes store, claiming it violated its privacy policies. The problem is that the developer didn't illegally obtain the information through hacking or other aggressive methods. Rather, it collected the information that was already shared publicly, aggregating information to their benefit.
Facebook's standard privacy settings have been the subject of much debate. The default settings allow for a lot of information to be shared, unless the user specifically adjusts the settings to prevent anyone else from seeing or using the information. Consumer advocates argue that many people don't realize how much information they share publicly over social networks, especially Facebook, because they assume standard privacy settings will protect them.
The issue at its core is an ethics question. The developers maintain that if someone's information is public, there is no problem in collecting and organizing it to develop a product that many people find useful or valuable. But for those of us who are innocently logging in to FourSquare when we meet our colleagues for drinks, or posting our pictures from that trip to Mexico for our friends on Facebook, we don't want our information to be exploited and handed out to just anyone. It's inherently unsafe.
So the outcome of this debate will be interesting. The makers of Girls Around Me are trying to figure out a solution so the app can be available for download once again. So far, it has been downloaded 70,000 times.
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