Foursquare over the weekend revoked API right for “Girls Around Me” a social app that allowed visitors to find girls who were within their vicinity.
The app would use Foursquare and Facebook location information to determine the sex of a mobile user and then list any personal information that person made available which was overlaid on a map.
After the app was discovered by John Brownlee at Cult of Mac it went viral however critics soon worried that the app would be used by predators.
While none of the information that was pulled from the Foursquare API violated any terms of service the company chose to proactively remove the program in order to protect female Foursquare users. The issue of morally questionable content has been highlighted in various cases lately, most recently by Tumblr which chose to remove self-harm blogs from its platform.
Apple also apparently felt strongly about the “Girls Around Me” application, removing the program from the Apple App store just hours after the developer lost access to the Foursquare API, of course at that point the application was already useless since it couldn’t pull the location information needed to operate.
I-Free Innovations developers of the program say the apps “goals, purpose, abilities, and restrictions” were misread by critics. “It is impossible to search for a particular person in this app, or track his|her location. The app just allows the user to browse the venues nearby, as if you passed by and looked in the window.”
Do you think Girls Around Me was a creepy app?
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