Sunday, March 18, 2012

Foursquare Tracks Your GPS Location Constantly

foursquareGPS apps use location data in a wide variety of ways—from helping you connect with friends to remembering where you parked your car. As these sorts of apps have become more and more common, the general public has started to be a little more wary of who is able to keep track of their exact GPS coordinates. Foursquare, the popular app that allows users to find new places in their cities by leaving and reading reviews. This, of course, means that foursquare has to keep track of where you are so it can leave a note on the map for other users. Now, with a new update, Foursquare not only keeps track of where you are while in the app—it tracks your location even when the app is closed.

For example, if you frequent a sushi place in your hometown, Foursquare will store that information and when you travel, it will send push notifications letting you know about good sushi places in new towns when you travel. That doesn’t sound too bad, right? I mean, who doesn’t love finding new places? Until you start thinking about it. I mean, we take our phones with us everywhere. That’s a whole lot of potential information that Foursquare has decided to cash in on. 

What creeps me out the most about this kind of intrusive GPS tracking is the fact that this feature is automatically enabled with the update

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