iMatt :: The Blog of Matt Clare

Really good blog post by Shea Sylvia about her chilling experience with a FourSquare “stalker”.

foursquare.com/ is a web site and mobile app that lets users “check-in” at locations. The social side that many enjoy is being able to discover your friends at locations, make new ones, and bring exciting elements of the internet to your physical spaces. Also, there’s “badges” like “Mayor” or “bender” people can earn for checking-in at a location enough times. People like badges.

I’m not a foursquare user, but I feel like I know enough about the service to understand its appeal and its danger.

Sites like pleaserobme.com/ made a joke to highlight the danger is publicly telling people where you are, “because it leaves one place you’re definitely not… home.” Their goal is to scare both users and services like enough to address this issue.

Shea Sylvia had a much more visceral scare. She’s OK, but the experience clearly had an impact on her: blog.sheasylvia.com/post/809428679

I also appreciate her acknowledgement that her mother will probably read her blog post. I know my mother’s the number one reader of my blog.

Update: BinaryParadox ( twitter.com/BinaryParadox ) tipped me off about icanstalku.com — uses camera EXIF information posted to twitter posts to get the location of the person posting the picture.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 14th, 2010 at 10:26 and is filed under Headlines, twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.