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Stomach-turning geo app shamelessly designed to help stalkers prey on "girls"

cultofmac.com

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Re: Stomach-turning geo app shamelessly designed to help stalkers prey on "girls"

#21

Post by angersock »

freshhawk wrote: post #20
angersock wrote: post #6

Nobody is going to take these issues seriously until there is some emotional sting. We've known for years about the uses of Big Data (good and bad), and people still cheerfully fork over mining rights of their life story to third parties to click cows and exchange pictures. Frankly, link-bait titles and apps like this are the only way the majority of folks are ever going to figure out that, hey, maybe this isn't such…

The majority of folks? I don't think so, an actual majority of people in the US won't be aware of this kind of stuff until some psycho stalks and kills someone and they find something like this on his phone. I mean, it will happen sooner or later, same number of violent psychopaths out there as always. The media will love the cyber-stalker angle too, just like Columbine was used to push the Violent Video Games Ruin C…

I am saddened by the fact that I cannot disagree with your assessment.

Re: Stomach-turning geo app shamelessly designed to help stalkers prey on "girls"

#22

Post by freshhawk »

angersock wrote: post #21
freshhawk wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of folks? I don't think so, an actual majority of people in the US won't be aware of this kind of stuff until some psycho stalks and kills someone and they find something like this on his phone. I mean, it will happen sooner or later, same number of violent psychopaths out there as always. The media will love the cyber-stalker angle too, just like Columbine was used to push the Violent Video Games Ruin C…

I am saddened by the fact that I cannot disagree with your assessment.

If firesheep had made a bigger splash among non-tech people I would have hoped that these kinds of super creepy examples would have pushed the problem into the public consciousness.

There was so little awareness raised outside techie circles by such a perfect demonstration that I've arrived at this particularily depressing opinion of what it will take.

I hope I'm just being pessimistic and not realistic.

Re: Stomach-turning geo app shamelessly designed to help stalkers prey on "girls"

#23

Post by r00fus »

anuleczka wrote: post #9
duxup wrote: post #3

It is a creepy app that exposes folks publicly available data, but I think the idea that it is designed to help stalkers prey on girls is a stretch.

It exposes only women's data -- and the app's logo is a naked woman in a stripper pose with crosshairs on top. To me, that makes me think of assault and/or rape.

Though you could think of it that way, I think it's more likely that sex sells, and the creator of this app thought that putting sexy silhouettes on his app would rake in the users.

Re: Stomach-turning geo app shamelessly designed to help stalkers prey on "girls"

#26

Post by DanBC »

kennu wrote: post #25

In case you didn't read until the end, Foursquare has terminated the app's API access for violating their venue aggregation policy: http://www.cultofmac.com/157793/foursquare-kills-api-access-...

Haven't they missed the point, which was that users are happy to share too much information, and part of that is because privacy controls are different across all networks and are hard to find and change.

EDIT: Sorry, that's an awful sentence.

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