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Foursquare Will Display Users' Full Names By Default
Location services can be useful and fun, but, depending on how paranoid ("cautious") you are, you might already dislike the idea of a social-network dashboard keeping track of where you are at a given moment. After all, bad guys can use computers, too.
Now, Foursquare may up your level of caution just a bit: CNET reports that "Beginning January 28, 2013, users' 'full names' will be displayed across the check-in service and venue owners will have increased access to users' check-in data, the company announced in an e-mail sent to users late last night." Users, though, "will still have control of the name displayed by altering their 'full name' in their settings," and can opt out of the increased flow of data to business owners. For users' sake, I hope Foursquare doesn't go in for the "real names" fetish to the extent that both Google and Facebook have.
Pitchforks in 3 ... 2 ...
Not sure what they're trying to achieve by doing this.
Know they'll know my last name is Coward!!!
-- Anonymous
It's bad enough with fully, easily traceable public nicknames. The Internet has become something that I no longer want to have anything to do with. And yet there is no way to escape all this madness short of moving out to some cabin in the woods and living like a survivalist, which I really don't want.
You really try to reach out to people, but it's always in through one ear and out the other. They don't get it. They think you are crazy. It's maddening.
Even this site where I post this on, Slashdot, calls me an "Anonymous Coward" in an attempt to guilt-trip me into registering and logging in for anyone to track all my posts and violate my privacy.
The whole idea of "checking in" was ridiculous to me in the first place. It immediately reminded me of the cartoon where the clever mice give the cat a bell as a gift. Why should anybody be surprised if they want to amp up the level of stupidity an extra notch?
Customers like they do now for Yelp. Twice I've been confronted after leaving a bad review on Yelp. The last time the manager at a Jimmy Johns was able to figure out that I worked in the same building as the restaurant and talked to my boss. So now Foursquare is getting into the business of facilitating the harassment and intimidation of customers.
I hate not being able to be anonymous on the internet (check out my username). I still don't have a facebook / myspace / friendster / orkut / foursquare / linkedin / twitter / pinterest / instagram / flickr / youtube account, but wouldn't this be one of the "better" sites to show people's real full names? If you care about your privacy so little that you're willing to announce every single place you step into and what your social network is, is your full name really a big deal?
Is there someone out there that uses foursquare that thinks "I want this website to know what my social network relationships are and exactly where I am almost every minute of the day. But showing my real name? That goes too far."
Google Plus, Facebook, Foursquare - a lot of services are really pushing the boundaries at the moment. I suspect the social media backlash is going to begin pretty damn soon.
On a similar, on topic note: Did anyone who does sign in to youtube recently get 'tricked' by a box popping up, offering them the option to change their first / last name on the service? I got it and thought, "fantastic! I can finally login with a name other than my gmail mail alias" and attempted setting up a different name. BAM - it made me a Google+ profile which I didn't want.
Upon removing the profile, my videos are now tied to my "Google+ youtube account" - so anything I uploaded, any favourites, any comments are not available unless I re-create the account.
Heavy handed indeed and from the musings on the web, I'd say I'm not the only one who got stung by this.
I don't think for many people it was about "cool". I've never used Foursquare myself, but I would assume I'd treat it more or less like a game.
In fact like any other game. Just because, say, Star Trek Online gives out achievements, it doesn't mean I'd define my self-worth based on those, or on anyone knowing I have those.
If I were to define anything "cool" about myself based on a game, it would be more like helping decrypt the binary .esm format in the early Fallout 3 days, before there even was a construction kit for it. Or stuff like making the first lightsabers for Fallout 3. (Yeah, I'm the same Moraelin as on the Nexus.) Or helping a buttload of newbies get started on modding.
Or my tens of thousands of hours sunk into studying history. Which, for game purposes, does give me enough knowledge to recreate an exact replica of a high-medieval European arming sword, or exactly an Edo period lady's naginata.
Not that even those would be my first choices to base self-worth on, but, you know, it's still actually involving more skills than visiting the same Starbucks every day. Stuff that if I were to brag about, it would still show, basically, "look at the skills I have! Look at the things I can DO!" Or something like that.
You know, stuff that takes some RL knowledge and skill.
Now I don't doubt that some people do base their self-worth on a game score, but not everyone, and in Foursquare's case I don't suspect there were that many who actually thought that their "cool" factor is based on how often they visited the same Starbucks. Even hipsters tend to think they're hip, you know, for doing other stuff than the rest of the population, not by some random thing that everyone else is doing.
What I'm getting at is that I don't think many people now deserve having their privacy violated and their personal data sold to the highest bidder, just for using a silly automated GPS game. Chances are a lot of those didn't even think they're "cool" for it, nor really used it for more than some silly lulz,
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Who exactly is behind the push for real names to be used instead of 'anonymous' screen names throughout the internet? I don't like it.
Every time I login to YouTube I get pestered to change my username to my 'real name', except of course the 'real name' they're trying to push me to select isn't actually my real name.
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
Who hasn't jumped on the social websites thing? I don't have a facebook, refuse to get one, and constantly complain to google about how they push plus on android and youtube users. Yes, I have a twitter account, but last I checked, they're not chasing me down asking me for a birth certificate to validate my identity.
I get the impression that those who want to tell the whole internet where they are at any given moment aren't too concerned about privacy. Then again, they may just be oblivious to reality. I know many college kids who have absolutely no clue that everything they post on a social site is viewable by the entire world for all of eternity.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
If they don't want their privacy violated they shouldn't be telling the whole world what they're doing on a minute by minute basis.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
You don't understand it because you are an introvert. An introvert defines his self worth in terms of what he can do, as you have illustrated in your comment. An extrovert defines his self worth by what other people think of him. Unless you understand this, you'll never become adequately socialized.
I quit using them over a year ago. Most everyone I know have abandonded them the second that Facebook started doing what they do.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Users, though, "will still have control of the name displayed by altering their 'full name' in their settings,"
OK, my full name is Hugh Jardonne.
Have gnu, will travel.
cancelled my account...
I am really proud of the fact that I don't know what "Foursquare" is.
I really don't need to know what all of my friends are saying and doing at all times of the day and night. Shit, life is too short.
I wonder how many twenty-somethings are going to hit 40 and realize that they spent more time updating their social networks than actually doing something.
You are welcome on my lawn.
There is a very loud and very small group of geeks that really care about anonymity. It's not everyone, and it's not even all the older geeks; there are plenty of us old-timers who don't have these cyberpunk yearnings and prefer networks that use real names (or just don't care). It's unfortunate that this anonymity bunch has come to be thought of as representative of geekdom.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Google had to agree to a FTC consent order after the Buzz social network, and this sounds similar to the stuff that they agreed not to to.
http://ftc.gov/opa/2011/03/google.shtm
The final paragraph says how to complain if you want to. For EU citizens, the US FTC is still the regulator to complain to, no idea about the rest of the world.
(The link is to the proposed order, but it became the final order).
I read the summary, I read TFA. Still no idea what "FourSquare" is. A "check in service"? For hotels? Airlines? Hats?
You really try to reach out to people, but it's always in through one ear and out the other.
Why they should listen to you? Continuity in the foundation of trust.
an attempt to guilt-trip me into registering and logging in for anyone to track all my posts and violate my privacy.
I have nothing but the most UTTER contempt for people who want to shout things to the world, but get all upset when we can tell what sort of things you shouted previously.
Anonymity? I am so done with the concept, or trying to protect it in any way. What you can see is the entire world proving out the "Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory" in fullest glory. In order to bring any form of civility back to the internet, we probably sadly have to kill anonymity in the process because as with all the best toys, humanity has proven itself not responsible enough to manage that gift.
Google realized this recently with Google+. Other companies are simply following suit, and more will as the people who value only the ability to shove racial slurs or hate speech down others throats move to the shrinking cesspool they term "freedom".
What you never considered to most people true freedom is freedom from assholes. And that is why they do not listen to you and are giving up anonymity in droves, because a world of real people is at least marginally more pleasant.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yes, in the UK, the US, and other shining democracies, you can be imprisoned for telling the truth - even if you don't know any state secrets.
If they don't want their privacy violated they shouldn't be telling the whole world what they're doing on a minute by minute basis.
The point wasn't to tell the whole world, it was to tell a selected group of friends.
I signed up to Foursquare after seeing two things in one day: I'd met a friend in central London. His phone "pinged" a little later, saying another friend had "checked in" to a nearby bookshop. We called him, and met up. The coffee shop we went to had an offer of a free larger drink for checking in.
Since then, I've never crossed paths with one of the few people I've added on Foursquare, and never received a special offer from a business. It's been about a year, and it's probably time I lost interest in it.
I've just received an email from Foursquare:
Hello Foursquare community!
2012 has been a pretty huge year. We’ve released over fifty new features, welcomed nearly 15,000,000 new people to Foursquare, and had our 3,000,000,000th check-in. It’s a bit clichéd to say this, but your support really is what keeps us going day after day.
As our product evolves, one of the things we do is update our policies to match it. And a big aspect of that is privacy (something we think about a lot). This email lays out a couple changes that we’ll be making to our privacy policy in the coming month, and explains how they affect you and what you can do about it.
We know that privacy policies can be dense, so we put together a high-level document that we think of as our “Privacy 101.” It describes, in an easy-to-read way, how we build privacy into our product. While it doesn't replace the legal need for the complete description of our privacy practices (which you can read here), we hope it helps you better understand how we think about privacy. We’ve also added new explanations of how privacy works throughout the app in our FAQs, including our default privacy settings and how they can be adjusted.
In addition to creating and refining those documents, we want to point out two specific changes to our policy, both of which will go into effect on January 28, 2013.
1. We will now display your full name. Currently, Foursquare sometimes shows your full name and sometimes shows your first name and last initial (“John Smith” vs. “John S.”). For instance, if you search for a friend in Foursquare, we show their full name in the results, but when you click through to their profile page you don’t see their last name. In the original versions of Foursquare, these distinctions made sense. But we get emails every day saying that it's now confusing. So, with this change, full names are going to be public. As always, you can alter your ‘full name’ on Foursquare at https://foursquare.com/settings.
2. A business on Foursquare will be able to see more of their recent customers. Currently, a business using Foursquare (like your corner coffee shop) can see the customers who have checked in in the last three hours (in addition to the most recent and their most loyal visitors). This is great for helping store owners identify their customers and give them more personal service or offers. But a lot of businesses only have time to log in at the end of the day to look at it. So, with this change, we're going to be showing them more of those recent check-ins, instead of just three hours worth. As always, if you'd prefer not to permit businesses to see when you check into their locations going forward, you can uncheck the box under ‘Location Information’ at https://foursquare.com/settings/privacy.
The Foursquare of today is so different than the first version that launched in 2009, and we appreciate that you let us continue to evolve and build our vision. This occasionally means altering our privacy policy. When we do, we make it a
Fortunately it's actually quite easy to delete your Foursquare account: you just go to the Privacy Setting section of your settings. You even get a little tick box where you can indicate that you're doing it because of privacy concerns. Whether they genuinely delete all of your data, like they say they do, is another matter.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
As i tried to make a comment on a youtube video, they suggested to post my real name retroactively on All old comments.
Except it was my wife's name. They did not let me choose which. When I clicked 'no' there was a multiple choice 'why not?'. "wrong name" and "privacy" was not among answers.
My feeling is they eventually will stop asking and just do it. They are quite MAD.