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Girls Around Me takes creepy to a new level

Girls Around Me takes creepy to a new level

By Nick Bilton, New York Times | Updated: 5 June 2012 00:45 IST

Highlights

Another day, another creepy mobile app. Here is one that allows you to find women in your area.

Another day, another creepy mobile app. Here is one that allows you to find women in your area. It definitely wins the prize for too creepy.

Girls Around Me uses Foursquare, the location-based mobile service, to determine your location. It then scans for women in the area who have recently checked-in on the service. Once you identify a woman you'd like to talk to, one that inevitably has no idea you're snooping on her, you can connect to her through Facebook, see her full name, profile photos and send her a message.

When you sign up for the Girls Around Me application, you are asked to log in to Facebook, giving the service your personal information, too. After connecting to Facebook, the app asks for everything, requiring people to share their basic information, profile information, photos, information people share with them and e-mail address. It will also ask permission to access your data when you are not using the app and post status updates, photos and more on your behalf.

"This would be a very different application if it didn't link back to Facebook, which is the treasure trove of information. With that link, this app could easily be a "let's stalk women" app," said Elizabeth Stark, a lecturer in law at Stanford who teaches about privacy on the Internet.

Ms. Stark added that Foursquare has a responsibility to inform their users of the ramifications of linking accounts that are tied to location. "If users are given the clear choice to be on this app, then that should be their decision, but it seems that this is not the case," she said. "In many cases there really is an education issue here, where users of these services don't understand the ramifications. This is a perfect example of an easy way to stalk someone people."

The app, which was first discovered by the blog, Cult of Mac, is built by a company called SMS Services O.o.o., which is based in Russia. Although the app maker knows a lot about its users, the company seems to have done a fairly good job of obscuring itself online.

After publication of this article, Laura Covington, a Foursquare spokeswoman, said in statement: "This is a violation of our API policy, so we've reached out to the developer and shut off their API access." The application is still available for download in the Apple iTunes Store.

Facebook and Apple did not respond to my questions of whether the app is granted too much permission and if it goes too far in its data collection.

The app says it also allows you to search for men nearby, but by default, it searches for women as its name implies. Although the app is a free download, after a few searches it requires people to buy more "energy" to continue searching for people in the area.

SMS Services O.o.o. has built other apps in the past, including CoinKeeper, a finance management app.

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Further reading: agencynews, app, creepy, foursquare, location based

Girls Around Me takes creepy to a new level

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