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.

By default, the first sharable folder is your public folder. Apple then adds three entries into the list of users that have access to it: you, with read and write access, and “Unknown” and “Everyone” with read-only access. You can remove “Unknown” and change the access for “Everyone” to “No Access”. That’s fine.

However, there’s an entire drive I wanted to share that only I had access to. So I added the drive, deleted “Unknown”, but when it came to removing access for “Everyone”, this is what I got:

That’s right. I can’t set it to “No Access”! I tried it using Guest access under Apple File Protocol and sure enough, I had full read-only access to my private data.This is completely unacceptable. Sure, I can get around it with file permissions, but that’s not the point. Apple put this in place with drop-down menus so that I have full, easy control over who sees what. Disallowing “No Access” to a shared folder is wrong, and Apple needs to fix this ASAP.

The solution? You need to do a “Get Info” on the drive. Then you get this dialog:

You click the lock to unlock the dialog, change the preferences there, close the Get Info dialog and then you’ll get this in the Sharing dialog:

Now everything is good.

I’m still worried that most user’s will either not notice this, or not know how to fix the problem. Worse, Apple gives a false sense of the ability to change this setting in the Sharing dialog by offering a drop-down menu for options the user can’t set from there.