Think before you share – Fourtrace

Location based social networks like “Foursquare” or “Facebook Places” are growing rapidly. Thousands of people share thousands of updates every hour. Yet, some people still fail to understand that not every old thing should be shared on sites like these, for the mere reason that it might be spread much further then they first thought.

Fourtrace, a research project in “Advanced topics in computer networking” at University of California, Santa Barbara highlights this fact perfectly and may give you second thoughts if you’re in the habit of tweeting your Foursquare check-ins on a regular basis. The application uses location updates that users from Foursquare have made publicly available through Twitter and presents them on a Google Map with a nice interface that let you trace users in an intuitive way. In clicking on the map markers you can even read the Tweet made from that location. The only thing you have to do is to type in the username of any Foursquare or Twitter user you want to trace. At no point are you required to supply personally identifiable information of any kind. If the user name is rejected, then the person you searched for probably hasn’t connected their Foursquare account with Twitter.
The site only uses the public Foursquare check-ins found on Twitter, so it is limited to what Foursquare users choose to share. However, even those who limit their public sharing have the potential to display predictable patterns of behavior. Over a long enough period of time, even small amounts of sharing begin to add up, and then Fourtrace can create very accurate maps of the places you’ve been to. How could this information be used? Time will tell…

By letting people know about these things that are being made public on something as widespread as Twitter when they are checking in and out of places, Fourtrace has the power to make people aware of the risky side of social sites. And this is exactly the goal that their developers had in mind:

“The purpose of Fourtrace is not to exploit people’s fears, but to inform them about what they are sharing. Location-based social networks can be very useful and super cool if they are used with care, but sometimes it's smart to think twice before you share your updates publicly on twitter.”

Fourtrace: http://fourtrace.com/