Privacy Invasion and Safety Concern: Girls Around Me App

[link to www.pcworld.com]

Nearly 60 percent of smartphone users employ apps that access their location data despite having concerns about risks to their privacy and even personal safety, according to a survey conducted by ISACA, a nonprofit group that focuses on risk and security management.

Location Data

Respondents to the survey, which polled 1,000 smartphone owners by phone last month, indicated that their chief concerns were advertisers' access to their information and potential risks to their personal safety.

Concerns about personal safety were piqued this week after sharp criticism of an app called Girls Around Me that became known as a "stalker" app.

Researchers don't know why consumers continue to use products that make them uncomfortable, said Ryan Calo, a Stanford University privacy researcher. But they see the behavior often enough to have a name for it: the privacy paradox.

Location-based applications are booming, but location data is particularly sensitive because it can easily be identified with a particular user.

"If you think about it, most of us have one location where we spend our daytime hours at work and one location where we spend our nighttime at home, so after just a day or two of these data points, it's fairly obvious who they describe," said Aaron Brauer-Rieke, a fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology.

[link to ordinary-gentlemen.com]

This is what can happen when you don’t understand the fine nuances of privacy policies: you could wind up a pop-up on Girls Around Me (“GAM”). GAM is a really creepy iPhone app that coordinates data from GPS readings on cell phones and Foursquare, and data from Facebook and Google Maps to give the user pop-up images of women physically located near the user. The user can then, innocuously enough, go approach these women to flirt and ask them for dates.

Or he could use the same data to determine where their homes and workplaes are, follow and stalk them, or rape them.

And while it looks like this is an astonishing and malevolent invasion of privacy, it really isn’t; the app only uses data that the victims subjects themselves have “chosen” to broadcast and make public. So what’s to do about this other than to lecture people to actually read privacy policies before deciding to share data about themselves?

No one else finds this highly disturbing, knowing how 'social networking' oriented young teens and pre-teens are??

This isn't just a stalker app, it's frightening from a parental perspective. If you know any mainstream people who have kids that 'update their status' every 5 minutes, this might be something to point out to them/ forward to them for their awareness.

Gives me a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. My boss's pre-teen daughter is one that is constantly networking. Scared me before, but even more now.

bump

I find it very disturbing, OP. Just didn't want to post something while you were adding all the relevant information to your thread

I think the part about cellphone GPS is the most disturbing. The GPS of your cellphone should not be "public information"!

If it is, that should be clearly and definitely spelled out in your terms, and I know for sure it's not spelled out in ours personally.

Not that I do social networking, because I don't.

However, I have an abusive ex-husband and a daughter with my current husband... very, very bad juju if that asshole finds out where I am!