This article was published on June 30, 2010

Foursquare Adds New Check-in Sharing Features, Explains Fixed Security Hole


Foursquare Adds New Check-in Sharing Features, Explains Fixed Security Hole

Foursquare has just posted their response to a security/privacy issue that a white-hat hacker had pointed out to them nine days ago, and which Wired has reported on a few times (their title today was “Foursquare puts money before privacy“, referencing their $20M round yesterday).

Foursquare says that the security hole is fixed and apologized to its users saying,

“We’re very sorry if information that users didn’t intend to share was temporarily made public on our venue pages or through our API. Please bear with us… we’re continually looking for ways to improve the sharing options that we provide to our users, and we’re intent on further improving tools and communication in this area.”

Ok, that aside, there is some other very interesting news in this blog post – Foursquare has added more sharing options when you check-in. By going to foursquare.com/settings, you can now enable/disable the following new info to share when you check-in:

  • Share your phone number and email with friends
  • Share your check-in with the venue owner (this could be huge as a way for Foursquare to directly convince venue owners of how may people are checking in, especially if paired with a live dashboard)
  • Show your name in the “Who’s Here” list for the venue

Here’s what the Settings page looks like:

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