Software help desk

Last week, hundreds of Facebook users who type “Facebook” into their Google search bar rather than use the URL in the address bar were routed to a ReadWriteWeb article instead of Facebook when Google temporarily shuffled the search rankings. What followed is one of the most tragically hilarious comment threads of all time.

After reading it, you start to wonder if Foursquare couldn’t eventually have posts from helpless users saying things like: “I’m walking unaccompanied down a dark alley with a pocket full of cash.”The problem with status updates and social location sharing is that privacy is incumbent upon the user, and many aren’t capable of handling that responsibility.

Foursquare’s comments yesterday said “Foursquare only knows where you are when you decide to tell us (by checking-in).”In this way, each post a user makes is a waiver of his privacy, fully left up to his discretion.

This means that everything a user does not post is meant to be private. But the problem occurs when users post very frequently.

When a user waives his privacy by default, he can become a target not for what he says, but for what he leaves out and deems “private.”Through simple deduction, an observer can watch for gaps in the user’s content stream and learn when he’s doing something he doesn’t want to share with the public.

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