The idiocy of immediacy

So here’s the problem. I like the idea of Foursquare. I like the little competitive elements. I’m the mayor of a few places in Dublin. I check in whenever I remember to. In a recent post, I spoke about how I hoped that cafes, bars and restaurants would get in on the idea by offering deals for Foursquare users. However, after a few short weeks of using it, I’m getting a little bit sick of it. Not because of the interface or the application, but because of oversharing. People share their location too often. I know, you can switch off the push notifications, and I have, but for some reason, it irrationally irritates me when people check in at their workplace, or in different rooms of their house (I’m not kidding).

It’s irritating, and I also get the creeping feeling that it’s an accident waiting to happen. Paul Carr wrote about location based privacy on Techcrunch a few weeks ago. He talked about how people were checking into parties in San Francisco – pinging out the full address and a convenient map for potential gatecrashers. Granted, Foursquare only has 100,000 users worldwide at the moment, but that number is growing. However, Twitter have added geotagging, and there’s no reason to believe we won’t be seeing it on Facebook in the short term as well.

Now, the good thing is that your data is theoretically safe. Or is it? Here’s a nifty little idea that some Dutch programmers had. Please Rob Me is a little mashup of Twitter and Foursquare. Here’s what they say about the project:

The danger is publicly telling people where you are. This is because it leaves one place you’re definitely not… home. So here we are; on one end we’re leaving lights on when we’re going on a holiday, and on the other we’re telling everybody on the internet we’re not home. It gets even worse if you have “friends” who want to colonize your house. That means they have to enter your address, to tell everyone where they are. Your address.. on the internet.. Now you know what to do when people reach for their phone as soon as they enter your home. That’s right, slap them across the face.

The goal of this website is to raise some awareness on this issue and have people think about how they use services like Foursquare, Brightkite, Google Buzz etc.

I must admit that I’ve seriously cut back on using Foursquare recently. I still use Twitter quite a lot, but I don’t tag my location. I occasionally use Buzz from my phone, but I’m very wary about broadcasting my location, cause you just never know who’s watching. This is just the tip of the iceberg – when you think about how a stalker or similar headcase could use a combination of Buzz, Twitter, Foursquare and others to find people, it’s quite scary….