25 Hour Watch

I prostrate my mind before you tonight after hours upon hours of television-watching with the dog, which has given me a headache that could kill the pope and still have enough left over to take down a couple of those fancy Swiss guards of his. And I do this for your amusement.

At least try and look grateful.

What I want to talk to you about tonight is the strange things that the hyper-connected world that we now inhabit — that we’ve allowed to come into existence around us — produces all sorts of strange privacy implications that we could never have imagined.

I’ve been playing around with Foursquare lately. (My account, which is quite boring since I don’t go out to bars, which is the target market for an application like Foursquare.) It used to be that Foursquare was only available in selected cities, but now that it’s opened up to use from basically anywhere, there have been a flood of somewhat… interesting ‘venues’ added to the service. Many people appear to be adding their houses, and it was in this context that I noticed this venue: “House of skanky bitch“.

I first saw in on the mobile app on my phone, and chuckled, building up an entire history for the location. “I bet whoever set that up for that location knows that the chick who lives there doesn’t use Foursquare, and really does consider this the house where you go for booty calls.” I imagined a check-in list as long as your arm of various guys marking their territory, a digital record of the, yes, skankitude of this residence.

A side-note, getting back to my incredible headache: I wonder if this is what people with coprolalia feel like. This headache is making me feel like typing fuck over and over again. Fuck. Doesn’t make my headache feel any better, though. Fuck.

I pulled the House of Skanky Bitch up on my computer to actually, you know, check my raving, sordid imagination against reality, and it turns out I’m a horrible misogynist. If I’m guessing correctly from the fact that just three people have ever checked in there, all female, it’s self-titled and entirely self-deprecating. All three have obvious homes of their own that they’ve checked in at as well, with similarly horrible titles.

The broader point here is this: I now know an awful lot about Christina A., Sammy B., and Sonia M. that I doubt they’re comfortable with me knowing. For Sonia there, a prodigious Foursquare user, I now have not only a list of places she’s been lately, but I could, conceivably, work out when she’s out drinking and either track her down all stalker-like or go rob her guaranteed-empty house. I have her full name, via her Facebook page, as well as her major. She has a formspring page where people can ask her anonymous questions, a twitter account, and a blog. Googling her common username soniamonia turns up a further wealth of information.

My point is, we regurgitate an enormous amount of information into the world about ourselves these days without even thinking about it. Sites exist to call attention to this: Please Rob Me got a lot of press attention when it was launched as a proof-of-concept automation of mining Foursquare listings to find empty houses, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation has a page on location-based services that’s an interesting read.

It doesn’t matter, of course, what groups like the EFF say, or the dire warnings they give. These services are too tempting to stay away from, and their default settings won’t be changed by 90% of their users, and everyone will eventually know where everyone else is all the time. Who knows if that’s a good or a bad thing, but it’s the next step in the evolution of the internet.

Now, I’ll let you know where to find me for the next, oh, 12 hours or so: in my bed, praying to whatever god might be listening that my head stops pounding long enough to let me go to sleep. I swear, I’m never watching television again. Stuff rots your brain. Literally.