‘Girls Around Me’ Developer Defends App After Foursquare Dismissal
The developer of a controversial mobile app that used data from Facebook and Foursquare to reveal the location of nearby women defended its intentions Saturday after drawing a firestorm of criticism over privacy concerns.
Context & Ripple Effects
The firestorm built over two days: on March 30 Cult of Mac argued the app was 'a wake-up call about Facebook privacy,' and by March 31 Girls Around Me had been yanked from the App Store. The confirmed cutoff came from the data supplier itself — Foursquare revoked the app's access to its location feed after the backlash, a sharp reversal for a company whose founder wrote in February 2010 that location sharing should be deliberate and user-controlled (on foursquare, location & privacy).
Today the developer is playing defense rather than offense, publicly defending the app's intentions as the story spreads across CNET, TechCrunch, MSNBC and other outlets. The timing compounds the exposure for both data partners: Facebook enters its IPO week with an implied valuation near $103 billion just as critics frame the app as proof that its data permissions enable surveillance without consent.
First-order effects
- Foursquare's revocation and the App Store removal leave Girls Around Me nonfunctional and undistributable, so the developer's defense is aimed at reputation and potential reinstatement, not current users.
- Facebook absorbs immediate brand damage days before its IPO, with commentary like Cult of Mac's framing its permissive data model as the enabling layer for the app.
Second-order effects
- Foursquare and every platform licensing location feeds now face pressure to audit which third-party apps consume their data and under what consent assumptions, turning API governance into a product-safety function.
- Apple's removal decision signals to developers that apps built on aggregated social-location data carry removal risk, raising the cost of the scrape-and-overlay genre of apps.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, open location and social-graph APIs give way to tighter contractual consent requirements and developer vetting — platform operators, not regulators, becoming the first line of enforcement on data misuse.
The trend: Consumer location platforms are shifting from open developer access toward restrictive, audited data-sharing terms as privacy backlash turns into direct commercial risk.