Some of you use Twitter, fewer use FourSquare (a Facebook-like site), and many of you use image-hosting sites like Flickr. In an age where privacy is getting harder and harder to find, you still may be startled to learn, if you use big social-networking sites or image-hosting/sharing sites, your privacy has all but evaporated.
Leave it to some developer to figure out a way to aggregate information from social networking and image hosting sites – and track users using their posts and photos sent from Smartphones.
It’s creepy. Yes it is and it’s also called creepy.
What is creepy?
“A geolocation information aggregator. creepy is an application that allows you to gather geolocation related information about users from social networking platforms and image hosting services. The information is presented in a map inside the application where all the retrieved data is shown accompanied with relevant information (i.e. what was posted from that specific location) to provide context to the presentation.”
If you really want to know more about this application – and it is free – you can read about it on the developer’s site http://ilektrojohn.github.com/creepy/ . We’re not recommending it, we didn’t test it, we only researched it.
The point is, privacy is getting harder and harder to find. Right now creepy only aggregates data from Twitter (with Geolocation turned on), FourSquare and a couple different image-hosting sites. But you can be sure that more of these kinds of programs will be cropping up and they’ll be tracking users of other social networking and image-hosting sites.
It seems a lot of people these days have a real need to be connected to everyone all of the time – even going so far as to want everyone to know where they are all the time. Be careful when using social networking sites and image-hosting services that you don’t give away more information than you’re willing to make public…to everyone.