Foursquare finds more funding, new privacy issues

Foursquare finds more funding, new privacy issues

Filed under: Web services, Social Software

Big news for Foursquare this week, both good and bad. The good: they've acquired another $20 mil in funding from Andreesen Horowitz, the venture capital firm led by Marc Andreesen, who founded Netscape way back in the '90s. The bad: there are some emerging privacy issues, including vulnerabilities that have allowed a white hat hacker to capture huge amounts of checkin data.

According to Wired, Jesper Andersen managed to capture 875,000 checkins in San Francisco, even when those checkins were supposed to be friends only. He did it in an ingenious way, too: by building a scraper that watched the number of checkins at a venue and looked at whose icon was added to that venue page when the number went up. Effectively, he could see when anyone checked into any venue he was monitoring.

I'm sure Foursquare will close the hole ASAP, and Andersen is only trying to help (he built Avoidr, a service that warns you when one of your enemies is at a venue near you). However, Foursquare faces the same privacy issues Twitter ran into as it grew. More data, bigger target. As the service grows, security will have to grow along with it. Hopefully that's where part of that new $20 mil is going.

Foursquare finds more funding, new privacy issues originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 30 Jun 2010 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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