Girls Around Me

» see girlsar.me as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

girls around me hit the international news cycle in the last week of march 2012. i was 28, working as a computer engineer in ankara, and the app was one of those stories that surfaced in the tech-newsletter section of the morning reader (or whatever it was called). a russian-made ios app that pulled foursquare check-ins together with facebook profile data and rendered a map of women in your immediate area with the profile photos attached.

the developer was a st. petersburg outfit calling itself sms services, with i-free innovations sometimes credited as the publisher. the app had been in the app store for months at that point. downloads were somewhere north of 70,000 by the time it broke through into international news. it did not do anything the foursquare or facebook apis did not already permit. that was actually the point of the controversy, and what john brownlee at cult of mac was writing about when he called it a tool for stalkers.

foursquare cut off api access within a day or two of the cult of mac piece going viral. apple pulled the app from the store on 2 april 2012, and the developer put out a defensive statement about how the data was already public before going quiet.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the cracks ~

the whole point of the brownlee article was that girls around me was not doing anything special. it was just taking the raw data foursquare and facebook were exposing to any app that asked, and presenting it with a stripped-down interface. the discomfort was that once you removed the usual ceremony of clicking through profiles one at a time, the surveillance possibilities of the api became obvious in a way that was hard to look away from.

~ the api response ~

foursquare tightened its api terms within weeks. facebook's graph api went through a series of gradual restrictions over the next couple of years. by the time cambridge analytica broke in 2018 the whole "friends of friends can query your data" pattern was already being closed off, and girls around me was one of the earliest incidents that pushed the platforms to think about default privacy postures for public data that had been treated as public in the technical sense but not the social one.

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