A controversial mobile application, that used Facebook and Foursquare data to locate women in a user's vicinity, has been blocked by Foursquare.
“Girls Around Me” was blocked by Foursquare at the weekend, following an outcry over privacy concerns. The key issue was that while the app pinpointed the location of nearby women, it also made available personal data and images (those that were marked public on Facebook), without the knowledge or consent of the women.
“In the mood for love or just a one-night stand? Girls Around Me puts you in control! Reveal the hottest night spots, who's in them and how to reach them,” states the app's blurb on its site. The app also claimed to be able to show the ratio of “girls to guys” at different locations.
On Saturday, Foursquare said the application was in violation of its API policy, which prevents the aggregation of its data in order to prevent instances in which “an inappropriate overview of a series of locations” is presented. The seven-month-old app had reportedly amassed over 70 000 downloads.
The app was developed by Russian developer i-Free Innovations, which has since removed the app from the iTunes Store. The developer, however, said in a statement that it would rework the app to show only public places and venues. According to i-Free, its intentions have been “misunderstood” and it only used data that was already publicly available. The full statement, published by the Wall Street Journal, can be seen here.
I-Free went on to say: “We are absolutely convinced that it is good and important to educate the users to take care of their privacy and what they share publicly. But we believe it is unethical to pick a scapegoat to talk about the privacy concerns.”
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