East-West Digital News 5 April 2012
St. Petersburg – i-Free reports that its venture foundation subdivision i-Free Ventures has stopped funding Places Around Me, the start-up that created the mobile application Girls Around Me.
i-Free decided to stop funding Places Around Me because of the negative reaction its mobile application Girls Around Me has recently provoked among potential users.
The application Girls Around Me was developed for the users of social geo network Foursquare to improve the search of nearby leisure and entertainment venues popular among young people. The application was placed in the App Store in December 2011 and it was downloaded by more than 70 000 people since then. During this period, no complaints were received from users, the press or social, governmental and commercial organizations. At the end of March 2012, following the publication of an article containing several factual errors, a number of media outlets criticized Girls Around Me: unfairly, the application was blamed for the fact that with its help individuals could obtain personal information about the users of the social networks Foursquare and Facebook, and also stalk and monitor these users of social networks.
These charges were absolutely unfounded: Girls Around Me only operated using the data of those Foursquare users who had made their information available in the network and that was available to third party developers through Foursquare API. The application didn’t ‘scrape’ or distribute any information protected by individuals’ privacy settings. Monitoring or stalking people using Girls Around Me were likewise impossible.