From cultofmac.com: Creepy App Allows You To Find Nearby Women
“How does it know where these girls are? Do you know all these girls? Is it plucking data from your address book or something?” another friend asked.
“Not at all. These are all girls with publicly visible Facebook profiles who have checked into these locations recently using Foursquare. Girls Around Me then shows you a map where all the girls in your area trackable by Foursquare area. If there’s more than one girl at a location, you see the number of girls there in a red bubble. Click on that, and you can see pictures of all the girls who are at that location at any given time. The pictures you are seeing are their social network profile pictures.”
This shouldn't be a wake up call to what's possible with the iPhone or other smart phones - it's something that should bring more awareness to just how much information you're sharing about yourself through social media.
Also, you're an idiot if you use something like this to meet someone.
Disabling Location Information
On Twitter, visit your settings page and look for this section and make sure the box is unchecked.
If you use other apps to connect to Twitter (i.e. on your iPhone) those can also add location information. Tweetbot for iOS clearly shows you that you have location information turned on, which you can turn off by tapping the location.
On Facebook, there's the privacy settings tab that you should take a peek through and see what your default settings are like. But when you're updating your status, you'll see some variation of this:
Click the city or location that pops in below the status update and you should be able to click a little 'x' that appears to get rid of the location information.
I couldn't find a setting to permanently delete location information so I wouldn't put it past Facebook to try and sneak it back on at some point.
Same goes for the Facebook app for iPhone. Look for these buttons to prevent location information from being sent.
No, I wasn't actually at Tony Roma's this morning.
Turn Off Location Information on iPhone
If you want to really make sure nothing is being sent from your iPhone 1, you can access Location Services from the Settings.app and turn off all location information or just select apps that you no longer want to allow access to your location information.
Like I said at the top, it's not cause for freak out and panic - just a wake up call to be aware of what kind of information you're sending.
- I'd assume there's something similar for Android devices, but I really have no idea. ↩