Given the tribulations that both Facebook and Twitter have suffered recently over the thorny subject of privacy, one would think that other social media sites have learned from the big guys' mistakes. Foursquare, however, has just suffered a security lapse, as reported in detail by Ryan Singel on Wired.com.
In a nutshell, the story is this: a white-hat hacker contacted Foursquare last week, claiming that a security hole on the site was making users' details public, regardless of how they'd arranged their privacy settings. The hacker, Jesper Anderson, built custom software to go through the data on its pages, and scraped around 70% of all the check-ins in San Francisco--around 875,000 of them--over the previous three weeks.
Foursquare immediately responded, saying that they knew there was a bug, and asking for a week to fix it. They also, according to an email, worked on their privacy settings, allowing the Foursquare crowd...
In a nutshell, the story is this: a white-hat hacker contacted Foursquare last week, claiming that a security hole on the site was making users' details public, regardless of how they'd arranged their privacy settings. The hacker, Jesper Anderson, built custom software to go through the data on its pages, and scraped around 70% of all the check-ins in San Francisco--around 875,000 of them--over the previous three weeks.
Foursquare immediately responded, saying that they knew there was a bug, and asking for a week to fix it. They also, according to an email, worked on their privacy settings, allowing the Foursquare crowd...
- 7/1/2010
- by Addy Dugdale
- Fast Company
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