There has been a lot of ink spilled about the Girls Around Me app that was introduced, and then pulled from the iPhone App Store. For those who are unaware, the app used the geolocation aspects of existing websites, such as Foursquare and Facebook, to show the user where women were located close to them. This was widely decried as creepy and stalker-y, and after Foursquare cut off access to their data, the app was essentially useless. The developer does, however, hope to bring it back sometime soon.
Was the app gross and juvenile? Perhaps. But it’s important to remember that this app was using data that was publicly available. The users who showed up were sharing, knowingly or unknowingly, their location data with everybody in the world. The whole point of Foursquare, and Facebook location tagging, is to tell people where you are: this issue here was that this data was being used in a way that people may not have agreed to, but they were making it public all the same. Plus, let’s imagine that the app wasn’t looking simply for women located close by: let’s imagine that it was looking for mothers with at least two children that have a household income of $70,000 per year. Now we’ve described a micro-targeting app that your favorite retailer of choice is most likely feverishly working on, again using public data to find what is of interest to them. Is that also creepy? Maybe, but it is the future of marketing.
The broader issue here is that we now live in a world where you have to actively manage your privacy. Fifty years ago, if you wanted to tell people where you were going to be, you could either do it face-to-face, or perhaps via one phone call after another. If you really wanted to be public about it, you could spend money to print up flyers or posters and then spend more time and money putting them on telephone poles and mailboxes. In short, if you wanted to remain private, you could, and even if you wanted to share your whereabouts with the world you were severely limited in terms of how many people you could connect with.
Of course, today you can just as easily share your plans with one person as you can with six billion, and all for the same cost in time and money: a few seconds and free. This is indeed a brave new world, one that has no parallel in human history. It’s one where you have to actively guard your private information, because it is so easy for it to leak out if you are not on top of things. And there is no going back. The genie is out of the bottle, the toothpaste is out of the tube.
What I’m concerned with is how some people think that we can find a technical solution to this problem, like Foursquare did when they cut off access to their data. Technical solutions can temporarily work, but it’s like playing whack-a-mole: there will always be a way around it, because in the end, this data is public. Some technical solutions may be worthwhile, like having applications default to “share none” instead of “share with the world”, and then forcing people to open up access as warranted, but this is only a tool, and a tool of limited use. Instead, people have to realize that keeping their information private is something they will have to work hard at. There will never be a technical solution that will solve the problem, because ultimately, it is up to each individual to decide what they want to share, and with whom. No computer can take over that decision-making.
Girls Around Me is just a very obvious example of the world we live in today, a world where oversharing is ridiculously easy. We are all going to have to rethink our online personae in light of this fact, and we are going to have to do this constantly