Julian Sanchez pinpoints what's so creepy about "Girls Around Me," a (now banned) app that used Foursquare and Facebook data to tell users about women near them:
[T]he reaction to the app is substantially a result of, as Hill puts it, the “design of ‘Girls Around Me,’ consisting of Bond-style silhouettes of naked ladies dancing and posing provocatively.” Suppose Foursquare were rebranded as “Hookupsquare” (or “Stalkersquare”), or Facebook absorbed by AdultFriendFinder, but everything else about the software remained the same. One assumes they would be a good deal less popular, despite being identical in terms of the information flows they enabled.
Charlie Stross extrapolates on the fundamental problem with this sort of app:
It's easy to imagine how we could make something worse than "Girls Around Me"—something much worse. Facebook encourages us to disclose a wide range of information about ourselves, including our religion and a photograph. Religion is obvious: "Yids Among Us" would obviously be one of the go-to tools of choice for Neo-Nazis. As for skin colour, ethnicity identification from face images is out there already. Want to go queer bashing? There's an algorithm out there for guessing sexual orientation based on the network graph of the target's facebook friends.
Edmund Zagorin imagines the future:
Of course, a lot of people want their friends to know where they are and what they’re doing at all times; they post it, tweet it, and check-in through FourSquare. But it may not be long before where we live in a world where our smartphone’s will give us the digital equivalent of Harry Potter’s Marauder’s Map, where we can examine our environs at any geographical scale to see the exact real-time GPS locations of our friends and family. To be sure, used wisely this technology has the potential to do a lot of good, probably even to save lives. But if information is power, then access to it is only as good as the intentions of the user. Which raises the question; who don’t you want knowing where you are at all times?
(Screenshot from Drum.)
The Dish 
