Marco Olivo

A few days ago I blogged about location-based services and their privacy risks and implications.

I was not that wrong, apparently, if you read this scary article about what happened to people on Foursquare.

Now I also understand why social networks like Facebook have not yet rolled out location-based features which could kill, in under two seconds, Foursquare, Gowalla & co.: it would be a boomerang for them, so don’t expect features like this to appear soon in the wild.

Accordingly to the article linked above, there is actually some collective intelligence in the internet to be gathered from the so-called “wisdom-of-the-crowd”.
Actually, I start thinking: what would happen if there was a better way to tap in real-time into what people are searching on Google? Probably it would be possible to predict stock-market fluctuations, that would not be that hard…

Please Rob Me? OK! Says Burglar

Not too long ago, a social experiment called PleaseRobMe launched, displaying the aggregated real-time updates from Foursquare users who used the service’s social sharing feature to broadcast their updates publicly on Twitter. Although that site has since been shuttered, the point they were trying to make still resonates: sharing your physical location with a public network is a dangerous and really dumb idea.

… but people do not seem to get it, and I wonder how many of these cases we will hear in 2010 and following, with the coming of the new wave of location-based social networks.
Figuring how to create a scraper that extracts lots of information from publicly available data is not that hard, after all.