There Goes the Neighborhood: How Foursquare is Subtly Threatening Your Anonymity

Imagine the following scenario: You're quietly enjoying your tea while reading a newspaper at your local cafe, when someone you've never before seen interrupts your morning respite by hollering your name from the next table. You look up to see them waving frantically, leading you to wonder if one too many tequila shots were the cause of this temporary amnesia. Before you can question the acquaintance, they simply say hold up their iPhone and say: "Foursquare!"

Basically, the issue is maintaining some sense of anonymity, something that many of us on the Web find increasingly challenging.  One feature that many people liked about foursquare was that it allowed for a more insular, protected network because, as with other social networking sites, you have to approve your friends for them to gain access to your information. Because this app takes it one step further by broadcasting your current location, users often were even more selective in their friend choices than they would be on Twitter or Facebook. And for many of those in the public realm (read: internet 'celebrities'), broadcasting their location was something they wanted to do in a controlled manner. With this update, however, people who you haven't chosen to be friends with now have access to your location. Which, not to exaggerate, can be seen as potentially threatening at worst, mildly creepy at best.

Before you abandon the app altogether, privacy aficionados, here's a few solutions. The most overarching one is to opt out of showing your name on the "Who's here" list; you can easily do this in your Settings. While this takes away from the ability to let users discover new friends on the system, it does protect those who want to keep their location private to anyone but their friends.  You can also turn off the now-misleading "Tell My Friends" setting on a case-by-case basis as you're checking in. While not a global solution, this will show your friends that you've checked in but are 'off the grid', thus protecting your location and removing it from the list of people showing up at the venue. Dennis Crowley, co-Founder of foursquare, also promises a few more privacy changes coming soon.

Hopefully, foursquare will rename "Tell My Friends" to something more representative like "Share my Location", since I'm assuming many legacy users may have missed this subtle, yet important, update. (Crowley himself weighs in on this suggestion, saying that it's something they're looking into for a future release.) In the meantime, check in with caution...you never know who may be screaming your name from across the bar.