Deconstructing the Creepiness of the 'Girls Around Me' App-and What Facebook Could Do A... - 0 views
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Cult of Mac had a fascinating, stomach-churning story about an application called Girls Around Me that scraped public Foursquare and Facebook checkins onto a map that showed people in your vicinity. Its branding was crass -- "In the mood for love, or just after a one-night stand? Girls Around Me puts you in control!" -- but, as the developers of the app argued, they had technically done nothing wrong aside from being piggish and crude.
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They took publicly available data and put it on a map. The sexysexy frame they put around it made it *seem* creepier, but in terms of the data they accessed and presented, everything was within the rules of the game. They had done nothing that couldn't be done by another app developer.
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This is basically how app ecosystems working with data from Foursquare and Facebook and Twitter are supposed to work. Some people out there get an idea for something that the main services had never thought of and they build it out of whatever data is available.
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Using the traditional privacy idea that once something's public, it is public for any purpose, you're lead down a very narrow path of reasoning about this app's appropriateness and what the services it was built on could do about it.
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using Nissenbaum's theory, the bad feelings that people have around the app make sense: People gave data to Foursquare or Facebook in one context and then it showed up in another context that they weren't expecting.