Online Oversharing Can Be Dangerous

31.03.2012
Online oversharing can be downright unsafe, as an app making headlines for being creepy and undermining the privacy of women shows.

A geo-location based app called Girls Around Me shows users a radar overlaid on top of a Google Map, “out of which throbs numerous holographic women posing like pole dancers in a perpetual state of undress,” reported.

These women who have used their mobile devices to check-in to locations near you aren’t hookers or people looking to hook up. They’re regular women who have innocuously shared their personal information, which then has been mined by technology and then served up to strangers in real-time.

The app makes use of publicly visible Facebook profiles coupled with Foursquare check-ins. So not only can you see where specific women are hanging out, you also get their pictures from Facebook along with information from their profiles such as their full names, ages, relationship status and whatever else they have shared with the world.

Playing around with the app, Cult of Mac’s John Brownlee writes, “Okay, so here’s Zoe. Most of her information is visible, so I now know her full name. I can see at a glance that she’s single, that she is 24, that she went to Stoneham High School and Bunker Hill Community College, that she likes to travel, that her favorite book is Gone With The Wind and her favorite musician is Tori Amos, and that she’s a liberal. I can see the names of her family and friends. I can see her birthday.”

The fact the app shares these details with strangers is unnerving, but what’s really disturbing is that “Zoe” shared these details with the world in the first place.