Geolocation is cool but can sometimes get really spooky. Check this out: I’m visiting my hometown once every few months. Last time I’ve been here I checked in with Brightkite. Now, as I browse the hompage unauthenticated, the very first (and only) thing I see in the activity line is one photo I posted 3 months ago.
This can easily get extended to privacy issues. When you are one out of many, things are easy, it’s ok, you can blend in. But when you get “featured” ’cause you’re alone, we have a problem here. See, not until long ago Facebook refused to display demographics or other analytics since I had less then 50 Fans on my page.Ok, say 50 is too high, but let’s face it. When you’ve got only one result, displaying it is a little over the line.
And I’m not talking about me here. I do share a lot. My walking tweets are Geotagged and rarely even bother removing the option. ‘Cause it’s cool and nice and useful for me, just keeping track of myself.
However, one of 1938media’s predictions for 2010 sounds like this: “A famous blogger will be stalked and murdered. The perp will have used social media geo location services.” Substract Loren’s typical style from the phrase and think about it. Geodata is the new exploitable piece of information. We’ve seen social engineering before.
Google latitude, Foursquare, Gowalla, now even Twitter with enabling their geoTagged Tweets and having Mixx’s product turn latitude and longitude into names of streets/closest public places. Need I name more?
Who’s vulnerable? For the time being, just the social media enthusiasts. But as soon as this becomes mainstream and defaultly gets enabled*, unless powerful regulations and policies are enforced, I believe we will see a lot of bad stories coming out of it.
What do you think?
*don’t start telling me about TOS/Disclaimers/App startup warnings, nobody reads those
