Danger can strike at any moment. My second year living in Los Angeles, my house was robbed. Three months later, while walking to my car from a restaurant near The Grove I was mugged. A few weeks after the scrapes and bruises healed, a so-called producer, whom I’d taken two meetings with to discuss a pilot, stalked me aggressively for a month. None of these incidents made me want to relocate to a different city.
But today, as I contemplate self-branding, the art of over sharing, and the potential peril we face as we promote our whereabouts across different platforms, I wonder how much time will pass before some of us follow in startup enthusiast Andrew Hyde’s footsteps and commit location-based service suicide. As Sarah Perez reported in a recent New York Times article, people are being robbed. It’s possible some people are being followed. In the case of the LA Tech community, people are being pranked, and not in the fun light hi-we’re-toilet-papering-your-backyard-kind-of-way.
Somewhere out there, there is a teeny little guy or a group of them who enjoy trying to get a rise out of Foursquare users after they check in at different venues. This creepiness has been pulled on food blogger Sarah J. Gim, Jenna Arter and Word Press aficionado Austin Passy, adrenaline-fueled angel investor Paige Craig and myself.
The Fourscare
Ten minutes after checking in on Foursquare at the Loteria Grill one chilly night in February, Gim received a phone call from someone at the restaurant’s front desk. When she picked up the phone, the caller asked her what she was doing there and told her he’d be waiting for her at her apartment. Gim didn’t go home that night.
“I was on a date, but because he was a new person I sort of felt weird and just said I had to leave,” shared Gim. “Then I walked next door to Geisha house, called a friend and I stayed at her place. I was kind of freaked out.”
The same thing happened to Mike Prasad. When someone called for him at the Coral Tree, he told the restaurant to ignore the caller. However, when someone phoned him a second time at a different venue, Prasad picked up and was told someone would be waiting for him at his house later.
Update: It was actually Jeana Arter and Austin Passy who received the calls at Coral Tree that are referred to above. Mike Prasad was involved in a separate incident occurring at a Coral Tree.
One late Saturday night in mid-March, I went to Kitchen 24 with some friends. Not even two minutes after I’d checked in, a server told me a caller, who didn’t leave his name, asked for me and said I should go home because Mark Jeffrey was in the hospital. The group of people at my table and I had been with Jeffrey earlier that day, but we hadn’t talked to him in a couple of hours. Our first reaction was that this must be a joke, but we were all somewhat concerned and we called Jeffrey accordingly. Of course, we got no response.
Jeffrey eventually called late the next morning, saying he went to bed early the night before and that he was nowhere near any hospitals.
A few days later, an unknown number showed up on my iPhone. I normally only answer calls from numbers I recognize, but I picked up anyway. The caller asked me why I hadn’t been to Runyon Canyon lately. Back when I lived in West Hollywood, I hiked in Runyon Canyon Park two hours a day and I checked in regularly. When I asked who was calling he hung up. Turns out Foursquare makes your cell phone number visible to anyone you befriend on the Foursquare.
The Fourscam
About a week before I was called, Paige Craig was FourStalked at Gold’s Gym in Venice, where he checks in frequently. It started out like any other work out session. He scanned his membership card thru the turn-style, alerted Foursquare, hit the locker room, and changed his clothes. As he was walking downstairs, an employee at the front desk called him and told him Ron was on the phone for him. When Craig got on the line, Ron said he was gym manager, and that Craig’s credit card had been declined. Craig relayed that he had just returned from a skiing trip, where he had been using the same card the entire time. Ron said he tried to process the card again and then said, “Sorry, it’s still not working. Let me confirm the credit card number with you.”
Craig asked the employee at front desk if Ron worked for him. The employee responded with nothing but a confused stare. Now realizing what was happening Craig hung up on the caller and talked to the employee, who said the caller identified himself as Craig’s buddy Ron and that he needed to talk to Craig urgently.
“Usually Gold’s won’t take an external call, This was the perfect social scam. The employee assumed I knew the caller and just said ‘Ron needs to talk to you.’ I assumed the employee knew Ron and entered the conversation trusting that Ron is representing himself properly as a Gold’s manager.” said Craig
Craig says the only thing that saved him is that basic rule of financial safety – “never give your credit card, social, or other key information out over the phone unless you initiated the call.”
The Pros and the Cons
I was adamantly against using Foursquare until a few months ago when I started writing articles about the potential benefits of location based services, such as exhibiting brand loyalty and tracking violent crimes. While I still believe in the benefits of geolocation, I’m checking in with more caution. (I’ve always only added people I know personally as subscribers.)
Craig is still checking in occasionally, whereas Gim has altered her Foursquare behavior somewhat.
“I thought about closing my account, but instead just stopped using Foursquare for about a week,” said Gim. “I started checking in again after I leave places, and I only tell Twitter when it’s REALLY good, since I blog about food and restaurants.”
At the end of the day, there is no real apparent reason as to why I enjoy compulsively checking in on Foursquare, and it’s naive to think that followers other than close friends are paying attention to other people’s social media streams. Unfortunately, not all pranksters and stalkers are bluffers. On the upside, promoting one’s own personal brand and being transparent does not require livestreaming one’s location.
So will I commit location-based service suicide? No, simply because I’m stubborn. However, I am questioning the amount of sharing I’ve been doing across multiple platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Plancast). Like most fun-filled activities in life, social networking is best practiced when it’s done in moderation. I’m not going to lie. I would have liked to become mayor of Runyon Canyon. However, I’m happy with just being the mayor of my own life.
