Girls Around Me app
After Foursquare severed ties on Saturday with the controversial Girls Around Me app, the company that built that application for the iPhone and iPad has “voluntarily” pulled it from Apple's app store. After all, the app essentially had zero value without geo-location data. Foursquare’s action was the right one, but was it really necessary to wait for a wave of criticism to know Girls Around Me was a bad idea?
A statement released by i-Free Innovations after it pulled the app and published by the Wall Street Journal, said:
Girls Around Me does not provide any data that is unavailable to user when he uses his or her social network account, nor does it reveal any data that users did not share with others. The app was intended for facilitating discovering of great public venues nearby.
If this is the case, perhaps they should have called the app Public Venues Around Me. And instead of the green-neon silhouette of an apparently nude woman for the logo, how about a nice image of the Golden Gate Bridge or the Grand Canyon?
But that didn’t happen. The company gathered a bunch of already available information, packaged it with a sexual subtext, and marketed it to men who wanted to know as much as possible about the women around them.
Portfolio.com has reached out to both Apple and Facebook to ask about their role in the creation and distribution of the app and has not at this time received reply.
In its statement to the Journal, i-Free called itself “a scapegoat to talk about the privacy concerns” and said the criticism represented “a serious misunderstanding of the apps’ goals, purpose, abilities, and restrictions.” Although the statement does make for interesting reading, it mostly just passes the responsibility on to others.
In fact, no single party is to blame for the existence of this app—i-Free built it using publicly available information provided by Foursquare and Facebook and sold it on Apple's app store—the involvement of such companies needs to be called what it is—a tacit endorsement. After all, Apple does reject apps for business or content reasons, and it reviews each app that is submitted for inclusion.
Apple—not to mention Foursquare, Facebook, and any other company that collects personal data—might want to pay more attention to what's happening with this highly valuable information. The next time company technology is used to facilitate similar violations of privacy, and potentially the physical safety of people who never even signed up for the service, it might be a good idea to get involved before the public’s safety is threatened.
amid 'stalking' row Controversial mobile app Girls Around Me allowed users to locate women near their location on a map and to see pictures of them.The app used information drawn from publicly available profiles on Facebook and check-ins on location service FourSquare. The women involved were not asked for any consent, and did not know their information, including photos, were being displayed to strangers.
Girls Around Me’s access to location-sharing service Foursquare was withdrawn on Saturday after the company was told it was breaching terms and conditions by aggregating data.
The Russian app developer, i-Free Innovations, consequently withdrew the app from Apple's App Store, and issued a statement to The Wall Street Journal. It claimed it was “unethical to pick a scapegoat to talk about the privacy concerns. We see this wave of negative as a serious misunderstanding of the apps’ goals, purpose, abilities and restrictions.”
The app's website had claimed "Girls Around Me is the perfect complement to any pick-up strategy. And with millions of chicks checking in daily, there’s never been a better time to be on the hunt.”
Although the app has been at the centre of a storm of protest online, led by website Cult of Mac, it only used publicly available data. While a storm of protest surrounded its use to stalk women, many critics also pointed out that the app in fact highlighted how much information people either willingly or unknowingly made public about themselves online.