Girls Around Me: One Woman’s Defense of the ‘Stalking’ App - lairdobler1999

Girls Around Me, the geo-placement iPhone app, is under fire for undermining women's privacy, but the controversy seems blown unsuccessful of balance. We're quick to ask what recently way technical school companies have devised to rob us of our privacy, but it's lignified to see this app as a real threat to secrecy or women. I consider it, instead, more of a wake-up call to those who in public overshare.

The app, which has been voluntarily pulled from the App Memory boar, culls publicly available selective information from social networks and spits out articulated lorr-useful data, such as female-to-male ratios at nearby venues. It too, withal, makes use of people's publicly visible Facebook profiles and lets users see any entropy those people have ready-made public, including full name calling, ages, human relationship statuses, and photos.

(See Correlative: Facebook Timeline Secrecy Tips: Lock Down Your Profile)

But how is any of this multipurpose to a local social network stalker? Some more useful, that is, than it is to a diarrhoeic old non-local social networking stalker.

If anything, the entirely thing the Girls Around ME app is loss to do is make socially awkward nerds even more socially awkward because now they have to navigate a conversation with a girl without accidentally mentioning something way too creepy, such as her birth date Oregon her "complicated" relationship status.

Someone force out rip up the app, get an cute woman (who overshares on Facebook and uses Foursquare to check-in everywhere) at the coffee rat down the street, and run over there and…then what? Start a conversation about how she went to high-stepping school in Montana? Ask her how her new puppy is? Surgery just sit in a corner and gaze at her and think of how she dyed her hair last week? All of these things are a little creepy, merely mostly they'ray just pathetic.

My IDG colleague Cameron Scott argues that the app shows a "dark side of social networking" — and the culture gap between app developers and literal people. Put differently, that app developers trust information is there for the taking, and that they privy use it to innovate in whatever path they witness fit, while people don't realize how much information they're openhanded forth.

Certainly, there's the contestation that market stores contribute when there's a lost kid wandering the aisles — Don't say the child's name o'er the intercom, because a child is more likely to go with someone who knows their list (true if that someone is a stranger). But I don't think it's light-haired to extend that argument to grown women.

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Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/469622/girls_around_me_one_womans_defense_of_the_stalking_app.html

Posted by: lairdobler1999.blogspot.com

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