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Re: Foursquare Defcon badge(s)
The minute you bought your first cell phone, you traded your location privacy away for convenience. You're doing it -right now-. You have no location privacy. If you simultaneously have a cell phone and complain about location privacy, you're a hypocrite.
Having already applied simple critical thinking skills to understand this fundamental truth, by and large, the LA, Seattle and NYC crews that I most often socialize with use the shit out of Foursquare, and before that Britekite, and before that Dodgeball. Ultimately this will probably switch to Facebook when they announce "place" support, but who knows.
Hell, a lot of people also use Google Latitude and broadcast their whereabouts to friends when they're out running around.
It frequently enables people to run into each other when they're at nearby venues. This happens with impressive frequency. It was great at RSA in San Francisco to keep track of what parties everyone was at, so you could get around and see everybody.
From a privacy perspective - I call absolute, unequivocal and unapologetic bullshit on the entire "Please Rob Me" thing. There are a million ways other than Foursquare and location-awareness that you can tell someone isn't home. Any information someone has about someone not being home helps (like mail piling up, lights off, watching them leave for work, etc), and none of those things require you to actually know the person ahead of time.
If someone wants to rob you, they can just sit outside your house, wait for you to leave, and break in. There is nothing you can do to stop this from happening other than not leaving the house. If someone even slightly motivated wants to break into your house, they are going to do so. Period. Get an alarm system, a dog, a shotgun, and hope for the best.
If you're going to take a position against location awareness (Foursquare or otherwise) simply on the basis of trying to keep your whereabouts hidden from "the man" or "bad guys", well, you better also turn off your cellphone, stop posting to Internet forums about what you're up to, stop spending money, stop leaving the house, and essentially stop participating in society. Otherwise, you're a hypocrite who doesn't truly understand the situation, hopping on the "me too" train to Poorly-Informed station in Paranoidtown.
If you don't want to use Foursquare because you don't think it practically benefits your social life, then don't use it. That's a perfectly valid reason.
Otherwise, the hypocrisy and utter lack of pragmatism with regards to the implications of location-awareness makes me facepalm. ("I'd never use Foursquare! It tells people where I am and that's an invasion of my privacy, I could be robbed! P.S. I'll be out of town at DEFCON this year for four whole days, and I just tweeted about how I'm over at a friend's house and I'm gonna stay here and watch a movie for several hours! Oh, and my cell phone is on and hitting towers, giving thousands of people at the phone company as well as every law enforcement agency in the country access to my location within about 100 meters!")
It is impractical for me, or anyone for that matter, to assume that they can keep people from knowing when they leave the house, locate them with great accuracy if needed, or follow them around town should they be sufficiently motivated. Therefore, I'm fine with location-aware social programs, because I might as well have an upside.
The minute you bought your first cell phone, you traded your location privacy away for convenience. You're doing it -right now-. You have no location privacy. If you simultaneously have a cell phone and complain about location privacy, you're a hypocrite.
Having already applied simple critical thinking skills to understand this fundamental truth, by and large, the LA, Seattle and NYC crews that I most often socialize with use the shit out of Foursquare, and before that Britekite, and before that Dodgeball. Ultimately this will probably switch to Facebook when they announce "place" support, but who knows.
Hell, a lot of people also use Google Latitude and broadcast their whereabouts to friends when they're out running around.
It frequently enables people to run into each other when they're at nearby venues. This happens with impressive frequency. It was great at RSA in San Francisco to keep track of what parties everyone was at, so you could get around and see everybody.
From a privacy perspective - I call absolute, unequivocal and unapologetic bullshit on the entire "Please Rob Me" thing. There are a million ways other than Foursquare and location-awareness that you can tell someone isn't home. Any information someone has about someone not being home helps (like mail piling up, lights off, watching them leave for work, etc), and none of those things require you to actually know the person ahead of time.
If someone wants to rob you, they can just sit outside your house, wait for you to leave, and break in. There is nothing you can do to stop this from happening other than not leaving the house. If someone even slightly motivated wants to break into your house, they are going to do so. Period. Get an alarm system, a dog, a shotgun, and hope for the best.
If you're going to take a position against location awareness (Foursquare or otherwise) simply on the basis of trying to keep your whereabouts hidden from "the man" or "bad guys", well, you better also turn off your cellphone, stop posting to Internet forums about what you're up to, stop spending money, stop leaving the house, and essentially stop participating in society. Otherwise, you're a hypocrite who doesn't truly understand the situation, hopping on the "me too" train to Poorly-Informed station in Paranoidtown.
If you don't want to use Foursquare because you don't think it practically benefits your social life, then don't use it. That's a perfectly valid reason.
Otherwise, the hypocrisy and utter lack of pragmatism with regards to the implications of location-awareness makes me facepalm. ("I'd never use Foursquare! It tells people where I am and that's an invasion of my privacy, I could be robbed! P.S. I'll be out of town at DEFCON this year for four whole days, and I just tweeted about how I'm over at a friend's house and I'm gonna stay here and watch a movie for several hours! Oh, and my cell phone is on and hitting towers, giving thousands of people at the phone company as well as every law enforcement agency in the country access to my location within about 100 meters!")
It is impractical for me, or anyone for that matter, to assume that they can keep people from knowing when they leave the house, locate them with great accuracy if needed, or follow them around town should they be sufficiently motivated. Therefore, I'm fine with location-aware social programs, because I might as well have an upside.
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