This article was published on September 29, 2011

Do you check in at home? Foursquare updates your privacy settings.


Do you check in at home? Foursquare updates your privacy settings.

I’m currently writing this to you from Courtney & Jess’s apartment. That’s an official Foursquare location. It pops up on Instagram, Foodspotting, and on the web. Along with photos, comments and tips.

A few months ago, Foursquare changed how venues categorized as ‘homes’ showed up on the app to help protect users’ privacy of people’s homes. This meant that ‘homes’ only showed up in the ‘nearby places’ list if you were friends with the creator of the venue, if you’d checked in there before, or if you searched for it specifically by name.

For the past few months, the devs at the popular New York City startup gave its venue database a massive overhaul and re-categorized numerous venues as homes. And today, Foursquare announced it’s making homes even more private:

  • Now, only the person who created the ‘home’ and their friends can see the address on the venue page.
  • Similarly, on the venue page, only those same people can see the map pin. Everyone else will see a map randomly centered somewhere near the address, with the zoom pulled out a bit.
  • The same rules apply if you share it on Facebook or Twitter.

It also added a new ‘Report a problem’ link, which allows users to report that a place is their home.

 A Foursquare little known fact: the most popular superhero-related home name is the ‘Batcave’.

Shutterstock/Edw

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