Where's (isn't) Waldo?
About a year or so ago, my aunt and uncle wanted to have a new carpet installed in their home. They worked with the installers to determine a time that they can come over to install the carpet based on their work schedule. They said that looking back, they apparently gave too much information about when they won’t be home and a few days later, were robbed clean. Everything.
When I started working on my “better Twitter”, one of the coolest ideas I had was to marry GPS with your message, so that you can say “I’m having a beer” and you could also geotag your location to show which bar you were at. This was the idea that motivated me into working on the project until I had one sobering moment:
Saying where you are might be cool, but it’s also saying where you’re NOT.
Maybe I have a streak of paranoia in me, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be the one responsible for creating a system that allowed others to track people. Dare I use the word “stalk”?
A system like that would be excellent for finding friends, which is actually what Brightkite does now. If you’re at Yankee Stadium, you can see if someone on your friends list is also there. You would also be able to perhaps meet up with people that you may have only seen on Twitter or Seesmic.
I decided to create some tips for people that may help in at least minimizing any fear they may have.
- Only allow trusted friends to see where you are.
- Keep your list of trusted friends small.
- Don’t broadcast your location on Twitter.
- Make sure that the system will be able to delete where you’ve been if you request it.
- If you feel the need to talk about your day, mention it while on your way back.
- Don’t mark someone as a trusted friend if you haven’t actually spoken to them.
I’d also like to suggest that the system offering such information about a person’s location should log the IP address of any computer used to access that information.
I can see in the very near future that people will be sending their positions on a regular basis, I’m just hoping that anyone looking at that information will do so responsibly.
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