Recently, Foursquare improved the privacy of its users by “blurring” the venue address if it is a home. People who can see the address are only you and your friends. Actually, Foursquare doesn’t want to make home as venue, but by the time being Foursquare which is badge and mayorship based makes people compete to be the mayor for any places including their home.
I believe that in the US, this decision will be accepted happily. Based on my experiences in online media, Western people consider privacy as important. They use their real name as the information but the address and other personal information are “secrets” and not to be publish on the internet and avoid people know about it easily. They tend to be more like using alias for their internet activities than using their real identity. The violation of the privacy will bring you to the court. There are many people grumbling if they have to give comments using the Facebook comment system because they are afraid – may be too paranoia – that their identity will be published.
Different place has different phenomena. Although Indonesian people are actually low trust society, based on my observation for about 13 years using Internet (wild guess, but it tends to be true), Indonesian people is easy to believe that all in the internet are good things and trusted. They easily publish their personal information in the internet – including where they live, where they study/work – and share with anyone, even the person they have just know.
In Facebook, they approved people easily, even for the people they don’t know. Then, they become friends and able to access our personal information easily. On Foursquare, I believe that home as venue in Indonesia is more in number that public venue and it is easily tracked using searching engine.
Actually, the self-awareness in Indonesia is quite low until today. They tend to be careless on any thread start from stalking, pedophilia, trafficking, and any other crimes. The fact that the crime are around us should be our concern. In my opinion, there should be education on internet etiquette in which those kinds of social behavior get more attention. Every internet user in Indonesia should protect his/her privacy to minimalize the crime/abuse from irresponsible people.
No doubt that we should appreciate Foursquare – as location based service – which help us to protect our privacy by its system. Let us help to protect our own privacy and avoid publishing our personal information in the internet. We also need to be more critical if there is any public service especially from local sites which compromise this problem.