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Why Privacy is Good & Social Media is Bad


OverSword

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Great read, highly recommend you click the link and read the whole thing.

From the article:

It’s an app that can be interpreted many ways. It is as innocent as it is insidious; it is just as likely to be reacted to with laughter as it is with tears; it is as much of a novelty as it has the potential to be used a tool for rapists and stalkers.

And more than anything, it’s a wake-up call about privacy.

The only way to really explain Girls Around Me to people is to load it up and show them how it works, so I did. I placed my iPhone on the table in front of everyone, and opened the app.

The splash screen elicited laughter all around. It’s such a bitmap paean to the tackiest and most self-parodying of baller “culture”; it might as well be an app Tom Haverford slapped together in Parks And Recreation. But it does, at a glance, sum up what Girls Around Me is all about: a radar overlaid on top of a Google Map, out of which throbs numerous holographic women posing like pole dancers in a perpetual state of undress.

“Okay, so here’s the way the app works,” I explained to my friends.

Read the rest here

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Very interesting article, and a little scary too! It is most definitely a MUST READ, and something to share with your teenage children! It really does point out the dangers of sharing personal data on social websites. I was glad to see that the app was pulled, but the author did warn that it could come back with most of its functionality intact. Thanks so much for sharing that with us. :tsu:

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That's scary. Happier than ever that I'm not on either fb or foursquare.

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Thankfully social media bores me, I never post much because of that....Twitter was kinda fun at first, but I had a group of friends who basically just said funny stuff, nothing personal.

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That is horrifying!

We are all on Facebook amongst others cuz we like to interact with our families and friends who are all over the world. I'm very big on privacy so once in a while I check all my and my family's social media settings, especially my daughter's. This app is just one of the many things on the internet that invades privacy and sometimes we can't always protect ourselves from them. But we can avoid this by regularly checking privacy settings or changing passwords, especially everytime there's an update. The easiest thing is of course just not to register in any social media or network, but then again, where's the fun in that, eh? Next time my daughter and her friends come for sleep over, I will talk to them about this article/app. It's always good to know the things we're getting into the moment we connect with the internet.

Good article, thanks for sharing, OverSword.

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If you could opt into whether you want to be displayed, it might well be a useful service, but if it shows exactly where someone is even if they don't know it is, that surely is a line too far crossed there.

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I just followed a few links and found the App stores as well as the site that accesses the app have all withdrawn the intrusive app.

The developers reasoning for making the App, so that we could all avoid the ugly girls...no sheite...

FB haven't changed anything though...

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I'm glad I don't use facebook or other social networking sites, I don't like enough people to warrant setting up an account.

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Defiantly a top 10 interview answer.

"So was this app made to stalk women?"

"It was made to avoid stalking ugly women."

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BOLLOX!!

it doesn't work on Android phones!!

.

(puts chloroform & duct-tape back in drawer.... )

.

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Thank you Oversword for a very informative article.

My friends and some family all think that I'm goofy for not joining everything from facebook to whatever the flavor of the moment is and I tell them too bad. This scares the crap out of me not just the information that this app could display but how easy it makes it for scammers and stalkers.

I'm sure, if the interest was there, a similar app for young men (with an equally clever name) could be created I wonder how they would feel about having all their info out there for who knows what to view in a quick glance.

The creators of the app's response was priceless, "to avoid ugly girls" and yet there is no sexism or creepy intentions by the designers there at all............ right! The ones who created it should have an app made just about them to see how they like being objectified and reduced to a soundbite instead of a person.

Mabon.

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It's going to be like the book 1984 eventually. It's already going that way considering how everyone knows everything about each other for the most part. That you can be tracked by almost every electronic you own. Makes you paranoid. I see this app as a very bad thing.

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Thank you Oversword for a very informative article.

My friends and some family all think that I'm goofy for not joining everything from facebook to whatever the flavor of the moment is and I tell them too bad. This scares the crap out of me not just the information that this app could display but how easy it makes it for scammers and stalkers.

I couldn't agree with you more Mabon. I have never been on Facebook, but I was on twitter for about 45 days before I quit and closed my account. I found twitter handy as a news source, but that was it.

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One of the most important things in life is personal privacy. Why anyone would throw it away never ceases to baffle me.

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Social media is pretty boring.

I used to go on there, but people are just annoying and post

the dumbest things.

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