Radical New Foursquare App Thinks You Want Even Less Privacy

WIRED

Growing concerns over online privacy have cost some internet companies lots of money, according to a new report, but that’s not stopping Foursquare. The five-year-old outfit hopes to boost its revenues by actively asking people to give up some of their online privacy.

A new version of Foursquare’s eponymous app, released today, is a radical departure for the company. Once a kind of online bragging system, the app is now more of a tracking machine. Gone is Foursquare’s best-known feature, a large “check in” button that users clicked to voluntarily share their location. Now, the app is keeping tabs on you at all times, sending your location back to Foursquare’s servers, which then push recommendations back to your smartphone, suggesting restaurants and stores to visit—and stuff to order and buy once you get there.

“To actually get an app to talk to you like a friend would talk to you. That’s what we’re going at here, and I think we’ve done a really good job of it,” says Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley.

The shift to this kind of tracking is a big gamble for Foursquare, which is still unprofitable after five years. The startup is openly proposing a bold tradeoff: Users share intimate location data with the company and get (hopefully) useful and relevant suggestions about where to go in return, suggestions informed by Foursquare’s massive database of 6 billion-plus check-ins and of comments and ratings left by past users.

Fellow social network Facebook has proposed a similar tradeoff with its “nearby friends” feature, which lets people elect to be tracked by their friends, family, and, by extension, Facebook, and so many other online apps are gradually eroding our online privacy in various ways. The question is: how many of them will face serious consequences?

“To actually get an app to talk to you like a friend would talk to you. That’s what we’re going at here.”

The upside of the new Foursquare is that people who stopped checking in long ago might suddenly remember they have the app installed and start using it again as it begins pelting them with recommendations. The obvious downside is that people will fear how much data Foursquare is collecting about their physical movements and uninstall the thing.

Foursquare

Such concerns seem particularly warranted in light of recent revelations of extensive domestic spying by U.S. intelligence agencies. The data you share with Foursquare today could conceivably end up in the hands of the NSA, hackers, or private data brokers tomorrow. “These location data collection schemes create a honeypot for malicious actors,” says Adi Kamdar, a staff activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “People tend to forget that these features are on, providing little benefit to the user while sending heaps of interesting—and personal—data over to companies.”

Crowley tells us that Foursquare doesn’t share private user actions “with anyone.” But it does approach to government snooping and private data brokers like “a lot of other companies”—small comfort given how pervasive information leakage and sharing has become in the tech industry. Users can at least opt out of the tracking system and then indicate their interests manually in the regular Foursquare app. And if they like the old check-in model, they can use a separate app called Swarm.

In my own experience with Foursquare’s tracking system—the service has been available on an opt-in basis since shortly after it was developed last year—it’s impossible to forget that I’m being tracked, because the app suggests places to visit several times a week. Therein lies another risk: That the new Foursquare will end up merely annoying its users.

Still, Foursquare is pouring a lot of technology into making the privacy tradeoff worthwhile. After completely reworking how it senses location and recognizes what venue users are at, Foursquare set about adding new tools that help people find places to go. Users can now tell the app about their tastes explicitly, by clicking on buttons, or implicitly, via their movements. You can tell Foursquare you like bourbon, for instance, or it can learn you like cupcake shops after you walk into a few of them. You can also leave “tips”—specific recommendations—about places that Foursquare senses you’ve visited.

The service then feeds all your movements, tips, reviews, and comments are into software that figures out whether you’re an expert in something—the SoHo neighborhood, say, or pizza, or cocktails, to cite three examples given by Foursquare. It may them use your tips to shape the recommendations others see on the app.

Yes, it’s a little disconcerting that there’s an internet database that knows precisely how much of a cocktail “expert” you are. You wouldn’t want that information to influence whether you get a job or how much you pay for health care. But Foursquare says the benefits far outweigh the costs. “We want to make super powers for local search, and this is our interpretation of that,” Crowley says.