FourSquare Helps Protect Celebrities from Stalkers

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If you read the article on BNet about how FourSquare Solves Celebrity Stalking Problem then you will know that social media itself has made it much easier for crazed fans to find out where Celebrities are in real time and with location based social media services they can track them down and pester them at their frequent establishments.  FourSquare teams up with MTV to solve this problem by allowing a “Celebrity” mode for celebs that puts a delay on reporting on locations so that the celebrity is long gone since writing a review or info about the place on the FourSquare service.  This helps prevent the stalker access but is only one solution to a problem that is growing rapidly in the industry (Location Giveaway).

Twitter has GPS features now and I am not aware if they have such a service that blocks locations if you have it turned on.  I myself use FourSquare only for social events to broadcast where I am at so that people can come to the same social events or raise awareness for the places I frequent.  However, such services open up lots of issues for stalkers looking for not only celebrities but what about crazy ex’s or just plain insane people looking for targets.  In no way should under age children or teenagers be allowed to use location based services to tweet or report their locations as this can put them in jeopardy in my opinion, yet there is no way to prevent this without having some sort of check & balance to accurately record the age of people who sign up for such social media services.

So the question begs to be answered:

Unless you are promoting a specific location or event you are attending, is it wise to broadcast your location all the time on your social networks?

What do you think about location based updates?  Am I being paranoid here?

-Dragon Blogger

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