Foursquare is a location-based social
networking website for mobile devices, such as smartphones.
Users "check
in" at venues
using a mobile website, text messaging or a device-specific application by selecting from a list of venues the
application locates nearby.[3] Location is based on GPShardware in
the mobile device or network location provided by
the application. Each check-in awards the user points and sometimes
"badges".
The service was created in 2009 by Dennis Crowley and Naveen
Selvadurai. Crowley had previously founded the similar project Dodgeball as his graduate thesis project in the
Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at New York University. Google bought Dodgeball in 2005 and shut it
down in 2009, replacing it with Google Latitude.
Dodgeball user interactions were based on SMS technology, rather than an application.[4]
Foursquare is the second iteration of the same idea, that people
can use mobile devices to interact with their environment. As of April 2012,
the company reported it had 20 million registered users.[5] The company was expected to pass 750
million check-ins before the end of June 2011, with an average of about 3
million check-ins per day. Male and female users are equally represented and
also 50 percent of users are outside the US.[6]Support
for French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Japanese was added in February 2011.
Support for Indonesian, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Thai was added in
September 2011.[7] Support for Turkish was added in June
2012.
Privacy
In February 2010, a site known as Please Rob Me was launched,[62] a
site which scraped data from public Twitter messages that had been pushed through
Foursquare, to list people who were not at home.[62] The
purpose of the site was to raise awareness about the potential thoughtlessness
of location sharing, the site's founder saying "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."[62]
A privacy issue was also observed for those who connected their
Twitter account to Foursquare. If such a user was joined at a location by one
of their Foursquare contacts who was also using Twitter, that user would have
the option to have Foursquare post a message such as "I am at Starbucks -
Santa Clara (link to map) w/@mediaphyter" to their own Twitter feed.
Similarly, if a user had agreed for their location to be shared with other
Foursquare users, that user's Foursquare contacts would be able to easily share
their location publicly on Twitter.[63]
Later in 2010, white hat hacker Jesper Andersen discovered a vulnerability on foursquare that raised privacy
concerns.[64][65] foursquare's
location pages display a grid of 50 pictures that is generated randomly,
regardless of their privacy settings.[64] Whenever
a user "checks-in" at that location, their picture is generated on
that location page, even if they only want their friends to know where they are.[64] Andersen
then crafted a script that collected check-in information.[64] It
is estimated that Andersen collected around 875,000 check-ins.[64] Andersen
contacted foursquare about the vulnerability, and foursquare responded by
fixing their privacy settings.[65]
In 2011, the US Federal Trade
Commission (FTC) urged
the White House to increase Internet privacy measures, especially for mobile
devices and social networks, stating that federal laws have not kept up with
the applications to ensure that personal information isn’t being improperly
used.[66]
In response to the privacy issues regarding social networking
sites, foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai states that "Users decide
if they want to push to Twitter or Facebook, over what information they want to
share and send" and "There is a lot of misunderstanding about
location based services. On foursquare, if you don’t want to people to know you
are on a date or with a friend at a certain place, then you don’t have to let
people know. You don’t check in." Selvadurai also states that foursquare
does not passively track users, which means a user has to actively check in to
let people know where they are. In the future, foursquare does plan passive
tracking,using GPS and other technology to constantly find location of users.[67]
On May 8, 2012 Foursquare developers announced a change to the API [68] in
response to a number of so-called "stalker" applications which had
been making the locations of e.g. all female users within a specific area
available to the public.[69]
In late December 2012, Foursquare updated its privacy policy which
will now display users full names, as opposed to an initial for a surname. In
addition, companies will now be able to view a more detailed overview of
visitors who have checked into their businesses throughout the day.
