Foursquare Drops the Dime?

Currently still online, Please Rob Me is raising a lot of questions about internet privacy and responsibility. Please Rob Me tracks Foursquare users who are announcing that they are not home and essentially broadcasts the results from an organized interface. It even goes so far as to draw attention to the time the announcement was made. The founders of the site have certainly made the point that it can be dangerous to write about yourself online, but many are justifiably angry.

There are cases of people being robbed after Tweeting that they would not be home at a certain time, so this isn’t some urban legend to be ignored. The privacy issues, however, can not be ignored either. Please Rob Me is collecting public information, changing the context in which it’s seen and amplifying the audience it reaches.

But when the line isn’t so clear, when it’s not so obviously hurtful, big decisions about privacy and public information are influenced by small groups of people all of the time. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s comment,

“A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they’ve built, doing a privacy change – doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner’s mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.”

gave real insight into the mindset of top decision makers at the largest social networking site in the world. His use of the phrase “we decided that these would be social norms” was especially frightening when looked at through an Orwellian lens; the norms are what we say they are.