I agree. I mean this is the reason I don't use Foursquare. Why on earth would I tell the entire Internet where I am and where I've been....

Why wouldn't I tell the internet where I am? It's not really a compromising piece of information. (For example: Right now I'm in an office building at 5th and Mission, in San Francisco!) I know that some people have a safety need to stay more hidden than I do, and we should continue to make it possible for them to stay unmapped. But for the average person: I don't think their physical location is that significant or dangerous.

Maybe because tracking down the address for a Jesse W. in SanFrancisco isn't that hard (you just need the right website), and after that... Somebody already pointed out that a "Burglar Me Please" app would be banal to write: you just walk along SF, and the app will tell you which owner is home and which is away, and how far s/he is; correlate with Facebook (is he married? is he so young he might be sharing his flat?) and you get a list of easy targets in the area.

It's not only about where you are, it's also about where you are not at any given time.

Not just _a_ place at _a_ time, but possibly a multi-year history of not just locations, but businesses/venues/events/communities.

I'm less concerned about burglary than I am about big business.

I wonder how long before we start hearing stories like "My health insurance just went up 300% - when I asked why, they said I visit bars on average twice a week, I eat out at higher than average rates at restaurants ranked on the high side of increasing heart risk, I routinely travel at walking pace through high-crime areas, and I've attended 13 events at which illegal drug use has been reported."

Alternatively you can check the house for movement, lights or noise. It's just as reliable.

Not nearly.

You might not see any movement in a house... but maybe there's a bouncer asleep in there after working all night.

Much better to see that the family announced they were spending the day at the beach.

Both: that's my point. A check-in somewhere else doesn't guarantee there's no one home.

No movement, lights or noise could also mean someone is in the house sleeping, in the backyard, in another part of the house if it is a larger one and you also have no idea how soon the inhabitant(s) will be back.

pleaserobme.com has existed for while (looks like they have changed it to be more of a data leakage awareness site but originally it just spit out a stream of people who weren't home).

It might be that the people with the skills to write such an app can make money easier and safer than having to resort to breaking into houses.

I agree. Broadcasting your location is only dangerous if you are in a potential position of danger. The fact that you are at work in a secure office building (presumably at Square) means you are probably not in a position of danger. Also, you probably don't worry about being followed home from work. If a young woman were broadcasting which shortcut down the alley she tends to take on her way home from work, one might argue that is a different story. You are not vulnerable at your location; some people might accidentally publish a trend of vulnerable locations.

Broadcasting your location also broadcasts where you aren't. I'm shocked there haven't been more news stories (or scare stories) about people being burglarized based on checkins.

Most people aren't at home during regular working hours. That might be why most burglaries occur during daytime hours when nobody is at home. No location sharing necessary.

One reason is that it's not just your location that's the issue.

It's your location + all the other public information I can potentially find out about you combined with your location. The combination of a lot of separate facts can, together, potentially make people open to risks that aren't immediately obvious.

For example consider what location from foursquare + sexual orientation from facebook + photo from twitter would give to the scum who gay bash. The combination of religion + location + face is another thing some folk wouldn't want to be public.

I hate to think what the National Front would have done with a "gays, muslims & jews near me" app...

Looks like you just might have something to hide.

People don’t think about privacy issues because our psychology doesn’t trigger much emotion for autonomous opt-in broadcast to people not currently visible. There’s no sense of violation. It’s very easy to forget about it and it starts to feel normal. In a way it’s also empowering to be so open; it makes you feel like you’re not afraid of anything.

If you actually step through what is happening when you use these apps (all the individual people you are informing of where you are and have been, your habits, preferences—a complete digital record) you might start to see some risks. Then ask yourself, even if it was easy, would you go round handing out that data on paper to large groups of contacts indiscriminately on a regular basis indefinitely? That’s what’s actually happening here. Now remember there are people (trolls) who get a kick out of being able to do things to do from a safe distance for no reason at all. There are also people closer to you who have fragile egos or maybe you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Using something like Foursquare is giving these people ammunition. The fantasy we like to believe is that everyone we know is trustworthy. The reality is not so rosy.

Or just doesn't want to share yet-more data to a marketing company.

Or doesn't get sarcasm.

Poe's law. It's not really obvious that this is sarcasm, especially because "nothing to hide" is such a ridiculous and beat-down rhetoric.

"Somehow the author realized that "normal" people don't think about it that way."

Could someone with a bit more understanding of "normal" people explain why this is? There are many cases where people seem to throw caution out of the window just because they're on the Internet. It doesn't make sense to me.

Normal people are used to having the luxury of being very open about almost every facet of their lives and not having to worry about it biting them. The privacy paranoids have largely been, well, paranoid. This has been changing over the past decade or so, but most people still don't believe it. Not really. Apps like this will change public perception, and have a backlash against permissive default privacy policies. At least I hope so.

Big data and user profiling is a somewhat recent trend, if you consider the age of the internet. It used to be that free web services merely showed you ads, and people got used to that. I don't think most of them have realized just by what order of magnitude things have escalated, how much information they are making public outside the immediate app and connected friends and how they have become a product for these enterprises to sell.

I would say that most users of these kind of applications do not even dream of the consequences of the combination of the data the make available. It needs geek mentality and more algorithmic thinking then you would expect to realize this.

You could even try to reconstruct foursquare locations of people who are not on FS just by their FB buddies ... try to explain that to "normal people".

And isn't it a bit scary that you seem to need more and more caution as time goes by? Would we need more responsibility on the side of the makers or do we keep blaming "normal people" for the world we create? (like we do it with, let's say, their inability to maintain secure passwords?)

The concept of a public lifestyle does exist, and I'd say it's a good sign that people do not live in constant fear of their neighbours.

The thing is, this is the Internet. Everyone is your neighbor.

And you raise a false dichotomy. Just because someone wants to exercise their right to privacy does not imply one is in "constant fear" of others.

I was using neighbour to refer to the concept of the fellow (wo)man. I did not mean to insinuate that people who have concerns over privacy live in fear. Personally, for me, I would more enjoy living in a society where some people are comfortable publicly sharing their identity.

But your solution stops being effective at the slightest loss of control of the data. Also, you can't control other people who might get access to it.

How does your public identity being tied to your "real self" helps you if some random person decides to break into your house? How would you feel if people you don't even know started shouting "Happy Birthday" to you on your birthday? How would you feel if those same people started talking about those genital warts you had to treat two years ago?

People will be comfortable sharing anything (identities, actions, personality traits) as long as they feel they have control over who gets access to what is being shared. I fail to see how anyone would feel comfortable sharing everything to everyone.

I'd say the examples I gave are far, far from any logical extreme. TFA mentions how just by crossing two (apparently) disparate networks, you get people potentially being harassed by complete strangers.

All I'm trying to say is that I don't see how to reconcile the idea of having a "public lifestyle" (i.e, let personal information be freely available to anyone that bothers to go look for it) and being able to have a controlled disclosure of personal data.

Well in my view, "sharing everything with everyone" reaches a vertex on the continuum. Clearly I'm not putting stuff out there that I wouldn't tell to, say, an acquaintance I met at a party.

You raised concerns over someone breaking into my house. I believe we want to stay away from the "you should be afraid of people" argument.

So I suppose your concern is that I would rather some information I leak out remain private. Sure. So what? Then you have to worry about things that you wouldn't want an acquaintance at a party to know. What are those things, how would they get online, how often, and what would the impact be? It's better just not to worry in my opinion, instead of running around putting out fires when a friend of yours on Facebook or Twitter publicly posts that it's your birthday.

I guess we are talking about different things. If you are analyzing what it is what you disclose, and the consequences of it being out in the open, the impact etc... then it's no longer a "public lifestyle", it's just that you feel comfortable putting some information online when other people don't. There is no argument to be made.

But the whole point about the OP that started this discussion of ours was not about information that people are comfortable to share with people they trust. It's about how people not realizing about the information leaking to people they don't know. You seem to dismiss that with the idea that it's a false sense of security. We could argue about that, but it's besides the point.

What I wanted to point out is that it's not just about security. It's about trust. And trust does not with blacklisting post-facto. It works by whitelisting prior known people. The people who got surprised by discovering they were visible on some creepy website had to learn that the hard way.

That seems kind of silly. I don't understand why people who normally act cold, uncaring, and distant in-person (basically: most Americans) suddenly want to be as up-close and in-your-face as possible online.

I'm going to make a statistical assumption that you're a male. Consider the different reactions the original article (http://www.cultofmac.com/157641/this-creepy-app-isnt-just-st...) describes from the men and women who saw the app, and why that would be the case.

In "real life", all I have to do is take a quick glance at the people around me, and I'll get an impression of how "safe" the personal information is that I'm sharing. It's a lot harder on the internet! Especially on Facebook, when you feel like you're talking to friends, it's hard to remember that the whole internet is listening.

Because rationality is a myth; we are mammals with language skills. Evolution has taught us that only things in the here and now can hurt us, and decisions we made (or really, failed to make by accepting defaults) last year are harmless.

Psychologists found a while ago that people are more open and less inhibited when technology mediates their interactions with other people. This same effect probably carries over to providing personal data to online services. Somehow it doesn't quite feel like sharing with the world when you are only making an update on your phone.

The average user doesn't think about edge cases when using new internet services.

    This app just shows what we've known, or should have known (...)

Exactly. I liken this app to Firesheep[1][2] for social and privacy (The Girls Around Me : Privacy :: Firesheep : Security). We're over warning people about the dangers of data leakages; now it's time to show them the consequences and scare them to consider whether it's worth the trade-off. Moving from telling to showing.

[1]: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/10/firesheep.html

[2]: http://money.cnn.com/2010/12/14/technology/firesheep_starbuc...

"We're over warning people about the dangers of data leakages;" ???

Isn't this an example that "we" are not over warning people?

I don't think kmfrk is saying that the warnings are unjustified, more that they're just not getting through due to oversaturation. People hear about privacy issues all the time, but rarely see or experience actual negative repercussions, so they begin to tune out the warnings. Apps like this are excellent demonstrations of the hazards of tossing out personal information willy-nilly, and are thus more likely to actually get the message across to people.

Exactly. First the warnings didn't work, and now people are desensitized to the debate, so an alternative to just telling people is necessary.

Warning people is more preventative than showing people what they've already got themselves into.

Do victims of this feel like they had their privacy violated? If yes (and I strongly suspect the answer you will receive in a non-trivial number of cases is yes), than this is as real a privacy violation as they get.