Privacy Matters

Privacy is an important consideration for any application where you share your location information. In a previous post, I talked about the tie between location and context; however, you should also be thinking about privacy. Knowing when to share your location and when not to share can really help you make productive use of location applications.

You would want to share your location at times when you are interested in having other people join you. If I am working at Stumptown, I might be interested in having people join me to work together, or I might want to have friends stop by for drinks at my favorite pub.

However, there are also times when I would not want to share a location:

• Physical security: prevent putting yourself in situations that could be dangerous
• Private time: not wanting to share intimate family moments
• Solitude: having time to concentrate or recharge

Privacy is something that has always been a priority for Shizzow from the earliest versions to the current beta release. While the decision to shout or not shout is always up to you, we also give you some other options to help you control your privacy settings:

• Choose whether to make your shouts public for the entire world to see, or set your account to private in the Privacy Preferences page where only friends who have your permission can see your location.
• You also have the ability to go into what we call “stealth mode”, making your current location unavailable to anyone. It provides a way to make oneself disappear from Shizzow temporarily, in a sense.
• Shouts can also be deleted from Shizzow. You can delete a single shout or delete all of your shouts from the site at anytime. However, keep in mind that deletion from any site may not be absolute, sine the data could have been copied by other users or indexed by search engines.
• Also, keep in mind that places are always public (regardless of your account privacy settings), since all members share the same place locations. In other words, if you are comfortable sharing your address with the world, you can enter your house on Shizzow, but if you want a little more privacy, you should either leave your house off of Shizzow or use a nearby intersection as the location.

We’ve been very careful to make sure that all aspects of the site respect the privacy settings of each user to avoid inadvertently exposing the private data. Our privacy policy also has more information about how we protect your information.

We provide the tools that allow you to control your privacy settings, but ultimately it is up to you to decide how much or how little to share. At Shizzow, we encourage you to think before you shout.