Guest editorial by Adam Rosenberg, Center for Democracy & Technology
If you are a social media enthusiast, then by now you already know that if 2009 was the year of the “tweet,” then 2010 is almost certainly the year of the “check-in.”
Social networks and applications have been churning out location-enabled features this year at an alarming rate. At SXSW, arguably one of the premiere tech conferences of the year, apps like Gowalla and Foursquare were essentially the lifeblood of the attendees. It’s not just new networks that are playing in the location space - Google Buzz, Twitter and (possibly) Facebook are all dipping their feet in the location-enabled pool. The new era in social media is no longer simply knowing what your friends are doing - it’s knowing where they are doing it.
As a greater number of location-based features have been rolled out, so too, has greater attention been given to the potential privacy ramifications brought on by these new trends in social media. Sites like PleaseRobMe and CheckinMania - two sites that aggregate public location status updates from a number of social networks - have given us just a glimpse of how much data is floating out there as we walk the line between “oversharing” and simply “being social.”
