An international scandal has grown this week around Girls Around Me, an iPhone application created by a subsidiary of i-Free, a major St. Petersburg, Russia based mobile app publisher.
Starting with a post on ‘Cult Of Mac,’ a blog following products from Apple, the controversy has been fueled by a flurry of comments from mainstream media in the US and around the world, raising a new wave of interest in online privacy issues.
“In the mood for love, or just after a one-night stand? Girls Around Me puts you in control! Reveal the hottest nightspots, who’s in them, and how to reach them,” promises the app, which defines itself as “a revolutionary new city scanner app that turns your town into a dating paradise.”
The geolocation enabled app combines publicly available data from Foursquare and Facebook to “scan” venues located close to a user for information about women (by default) and men who checked-in there. Although the app is a free download, after a few searches it requires users to buy more “energy” to continue searching for people in the area. Girls Around Me was downloaded by more than 70,000 people during its first several months.
“The dark side of social networking”
“This Creepy App Isn’t Just Stalking Women Without Their Knowledge, It’s A Wake-Up Call About Facebook Privacy,” Cult of Mac wrote last Friday, accusing it of “having the potential to be used a tool for rapists and stalkers.”
Foursquare immediately closed the access to its API for the app, while Facebook and Apple did not comment on the accusation.
In a statement published in the Wall Street Journal, i-Free defended the app, saying it had been designed merely “to make it easier for a user to step out of doors and hang out in the city, find people with common interests and new places to go to.” The Russian company also removed the app from the iTunes Store, allegedly for technical reasons, but that didn’t stop the firestorm. “The dark side of social networking,” “The end of Internet innocence,” “The creepiest social mobile app,” and “Stalker app hunts women via Facebook” were among the headlines of the articles published in the days following the Cult of Mac post.
More than half a million people visited the Cult of Mac blog; 66 thousand shared the post on Facebook. Hundreds of people commented on the topic.
The opposition to the app pointed out that Girls Around Me used the information about the women without their permission. “Users of the app who have bad intentions could pose a physical threat to people. An app that collates publicly available data about people could also make them easier targets for spear phishing,” McAfee Chief Privacy Officer Michelle Dennedy warned.
Another major point of criticism was the app’s visual design. “These ‘nice guys’ present women as shiny metallic objects, targets to be taken down, complete with radar imagery. These nice guys developed an app that made some who first saw it think the women within were prostitutes,” said a TechCrunch author expressing his resentment.
“The apps of the future”
Interestingly enough, while almost all authors of the articles called Girls Around Me creepy and unacceptable, the majority of comments to the articles have been in support of the app. Many argued that the app was not hacking into the information which users did not make public.
Most participants of the discussion agreed that the app did not violate any legal rules, and that it was not the only one to offer such features.
Some of those who commented even applauded to the developer. “I think apps like ‘Girls Around Me’ are the future. Some of us Foursquare users and public Twitterers are choosing to give up our privacy – and how much to give up, depending on the settings we choose. We don’t fear making connections with strangers; we crave it,” Kashmir Hill wrote on Forbes magazine.
Marie Connelly, who happened to be one of the “girls” pictured in the initial post of Cult of Mac, published a comment sharing this opinion.
Acknowledging that Girls Around Me had “recently provoked negative reactions among potential users,” i-Free finally decided to stop funding its subsidiary which had developed the app.
