Foursquare City Guide

The service was created in late 2008 by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai and launched in 2009.^[5] Crowley had previously founded the similar project Dodgeball as his graduate thesis project in the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at New York University. Google bought Dodgeball in 2005 and shut it down in 2009, replacing it with Google Latitude. Dodgeball user interactions were based on SMS technology, rather than an application.^[6] Foursquare was similar but allowed for more features, allowing mobile device users to interact with their environment. Foursquare took advantage of new smartphones like the iPhone, which had built-in GPS to better detect a user's location.


Until late July 2014, Foursquare featured a social networking layer that enabled a user to share their location with friends, via the "check in" - a user would manually tell the application when they were at a particular location using a mobile website, text messaging, or a device-specific application by selecting from a list of venues the application locates nearby.^[7] In May 2014, the company launched Swarm, a companion app to Foursquare City Guide, that reimagined the social networking and location sharing aspects of the service as a separate application. On August 7, 2014, the company launched Foursquare 8.0, a new version of the service. This version removed the check-in feature and location sharing, instead focusing on local search.


In 2011, user demographics showed a roughly equal split between male and female user accounts, with 50 percent of users registered outside of the US.^[8] Most recent statistics show Foursquare with approximately 55 million monthly active users.^[9]

Foursquare Day[edit]

Foursquare Day was coined by Nate Bonilla-Warford, an optometrist from Tampa, Florida, on March 12, 2010. The idea came to him while "thinking about new ways to promote his business".^[36]


In 2010, McDonald's launched a spring pilot program that took advantage of Foursquare Day. Foursquare users who checked into McDonald's restaurants on Foursquare Day were given the chance to win gift cards in $5 and $10 increments. Mashable reported that there was a "33% increase in foot traffic" to McDonald's venues, as apparent in the increase in Foursquare check-ins.^[37]

Privacy[edit]

In February 2010, a site known as Please Rob Me was launched,^[38] a site which scraped data from public Twitter messages that had been pushed through Foursquare, to list people who were not at home.^[38] The purpose of the site was to raise awareness about the potential thoughtlessness of location sharing.^[38]


In March 2010, a privacy issue was observed for users who connected their Twitter account to Foursquare. If the user was joined at a location by one of their Foursquare contacts who was also using Twitter, that user could allow Foursquare to post a message such as "I am at Starbucks – Santa Clara (link to map) w/@mediaphyter" to their own Twitter feed. Similarly, if a user had agreed to Foursquare location sharing, that user's Foursquare contacts would be able to share their location publicly on Twitter.^[39]


Later in 2010, white hat hacker Jesper Andersen discovered a vulnerability on Foursquare that raised privacy concerns.^[40][41] Foursquare's location pages display a grid of 50 randomly generated photos regardless of their privacy settings.^[40] Whenever a user "checks in" at that location, their picture is generated on that location page, even if they only want their friends to know where they are.^[40] Andersen then crafted a script that collected check-in information.^[40] It is estimated that Andersen collected around 875,000 check-ins.^[40] Andersen contacted Foursquare about the vulnerability, and Foursquare responded by fixing their privacy settings.^[41]


In 2011, in response to privacy issues regarding social networking sites, Foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai stated that "Users decide if they want to push to Twitter or Facebook, over what information they want to share and send" and "There is a lot of misunderstanding about location-based services. On Foursquare, if you don't want people to know you are on a date or with a friend at a certain place, then you don't have to let people know. You don't check in." Selvadurai also stated that Foursquare does not passively track users, which means a user has to actively check in to let people know where they are.^[42]


On May 8, 2012, Foursquare developers changed its API^[43] in response to a number of "stalker" applications which had been making the locations of all female users within a specific area available to the public.^[44]


In late December 2012, Foursquare updated its privacy policy to indicate it would display users' full names, as opposed to an initial for a surname. In addition, companies could view a more detailed overview of visitors who have checked into their businesses throughout the day.^[45]


Foursquare has since updated both its privacy policy and cookies policy to detail how location data is used in new features and products.^[46]