Foursquare's new privacy policy

Here's the email that Foursquare sent to its users regarding its new privacy policy. Remember, they can only show your full name if you actually give them your full name. They're making it pretty clear that you can change this if you don't want your actual full name displayed.

Hello Foursquare community!

2012 has been a pretty huge year. We’ve released over fifty new features, welcomed nearly 15,000,000 new people to Foursquare, and had our 3,000,000,000th check-in. It’s a bit clichéd to say this, but your support really is what keeps us going day after day.

As our product evolves, one of the things we do is update our policies to match it. And a big aspect of that is privacy (something we think about a lot). This email lays out a couple changes that we’ll be making to our privacy policy in the coming month, and explains how they affect you and what you can do about it. 

We know that privacy policies can be dense, so we put together a high-level document that we think of as our “Privacy 101.” It describes, in an easy-to-read way, how we build privacy into our product. While it doesn't replace the legal need for the complete description of our privacy practices (which you can read here), we hope it helps you better understand how we think about privacy. We’ve also added new explanations of how privacy works throughout the app in our FAQs, including our default privacy settings and how they can be adjusted. 

In addition to creating and refining those documents, we want to point out two specific changes to our policy, both of which will go into effect on January 28, 2013. 

1. We will now display your full name. Currently, Foursquare sometimes shows your full name and sometimes shows your first name and last initial (“John Smith” vs. “John S.”). For instance, if you search for a friend in Foursquare, we show their full name in the results, but when you click through to their profile page you don’t see their last name. In the original versions of Foursquare, these distinctions made sense. But we get emails every day saying that it's now confusing. So, with this change, full names are going to be public. As always, you can alter your ‘full name’ on Foursquare at https://foursquare.com/settings. 

2. A business on Foursquare will be able to see more of their recent customers. Currently, a business using Foursquare (like your corner coffee shop) can see the customers who have checked in in the last three hours (in addition to the most recent and their most loyal visitors). This is great for helping store owners identify their customers and give them more personal service or offers. But a lot of businesses only have time to log in at the end of the day to look at it. So, with this change, we're going to be showing them more of those recent check-ins, instead of just three hours worth. As always, if you'd prefer not to permit businesses to see when you check into their locations going forward, you can uncheck the box under ‘Location Information’ at https://foursquare.com/settings/privacy. 

The Foursquare of today is so different than the first version that launched in 2009, and we appreciate that you let us continue to evolve and build our vision. This occasionally means altering our privacy policy. When we do, we make it a priority to come up with clear ways to help you understand your privacy choices, and to communicate them clearly. If you have any questions or want more details, head over to our updated privacy policy or support.foursquare.com. 

Have a lovely holiday, and thanks for being part of the nearly 30,000,000-strong Foursquare community. We have a lot planned for 2013! 

- Team Foursquare

Vacations and social media opsec

I just returned from five days of vacation in Florida. Chances are that (unless you follow me on Foursquare and scrutinize my check-ins) you probably didn't know I was gone. We posted no pictures of our vacation activities, didn't make any comments or posts related to what we were doing. One exception that I noted above was Foursquare, where I did check in partly to record our trail of activities and also because I have less followers there and was less concerned about word getting out.

Sites like Please Rob Me (if perhaps a bit over-hyped) highlight the concerns about posting your activities on social media. Especially important is when you're away from home for an extended period of time. Thus, this was a deliberate strategy that Tracy and I followed explicitly for this purpose.

But this is probably not enough. I post a lot on both Twitter and Facebook and if I suddenly disappeared for a while, someone might take notice of that, too. So, step two: Using Buffer (or some other similar application), each night I scheduled a series of tweets and posts spread out during the next day on subjects that I usually talk about. From a third party perspective, things ought to seem just plain ordinary. So when you thought I was tweeting about some infosec article, I was probably riding a roller coaster. :-)

The idea here wasn't or isn't to trick anyone or orchestrate some elaborate deception campaign, just to be careful about what you're posting in similar circumstances; and follow that up with the same sort of content and material that people already expect of you.

Now that we're home again, you can expect to see pictures from the vacation in the near future. I also have some notes about some of our interesting experiences over the last week to flesh out into blog posts.

Now, I need some sleep...