Ron Davis – moreron.com

Some coworkers recently introduced me to foursquare, a social networking application for your phone that you use to “check in” wherever you go. You go to the movies? Check in. Home Depot? Check in. The gym? Check in. It uses your phone’s GPS to figure out where you are, and checking in is a relatively easy procedure.

When you visit a place enough, you become the mayor of that location. Mayoral status comes complete with bragging rights. It’s been kind of a cool app to play with among coworkers over the last few weeks. So far, I am mayor of 6 places. Impressive, I know.

You can earn badges for doing different things. I’ve earned badges for checking in at 1, 10, and 25 locations; for checking in 30 times in a month; and for checking in at the same place 3 times in a week.

The other day I got a friend request from someone whose name I didn’t recognize. I looked her up to see how I might know her (because I’m terrible with names). I found out that I don’t actually know her but that we do go to the same gym (she had checked in at the gym where I’m mayor).

It took all of 3 minutes for me to find her MySpace and Facebook profiles. She has a picture on her profiles, and I do recognize her from the gym. Her Facebook profile URL indicates her profession and her MySpace profile says she’s single. I figured out that since we’re friends, foursquare will give me her phone number and email address. Her email address has the year of her birth in it, so I know that she’s 24.

So at this point, I have regular access to this single, 24 year old girl’s physical location, age, profession, shopping habits, email address, and phone number – and we have never met! Obviously, I’m not going to follow her around town (or worse), but this would be some pretty dangerous information to put in the wrong hands.

The good news is that she had to initiate the connection. If she hadn’t made the initial contact, I’d have none of this information. Still, there are some things that could (should!) be done to protect privacy and to be safe online.

• Limit foursquare friends to people you know and trust. If you wouldn’t give them a spare key to your home, you probably don’t want them to be able to locate you at will.
• Don’t check in at work. It would be really easy to figure out where someone works if they check in there at the same time every day.
• Opt out of information sharing. Foursquare will only give your phone number and email address if you tell them it’s ok to do so.  You’re opted in by default, but unchecking that box is something you really should consider.
• Don’t use foursquare. Give serious consideration to whether it’s a good idea to have your real, physical location broadcast on a regular basis.

I work for InternetSafety.com, a company that provides Internet safety solutions, so I hear a lot of sad stories about people who didn’t make their online safety a priority.  Most of the focus in the news of being safe online is centered around protecting children, and while there’s certainly a need for that, if you’re a 24 year old single female in Acworth, Georgia, you might also want to rethink how available you make your personal information.  That other guy from the gym may not be as harmless as I am.

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