[benihana]

So let me see if this makes sense. This article is talking about how stomach turning and skin crawling Girls Around Me is. To demonstrate this, the author writes a wordy, boring blog post in the style of a short story and posts pictures of the same poor girls that show up in the app without their permission or knowledge, then has the balls to call the creators of the app villains.

He calls the people who use this app creeps and stalkers, yet he downloads it, shows it to a table of his friends, then writes about it. Comes off as a completely hypocritical white knight.

[pacaro]

I got a different take from the post.

He does take a long time to get to the point, but I don't think that he is trying to criticize the app authors, or Apple, he's trying to make a point about how Facebook and FourSquare make it too easy to over share personal information.

If the information is available via public APIs then anyone could write the App, I think the author is trying to point out that people need to be educated about what the possible consequences of their facebook (et. al.) privacy settings are.

Using this app as a vivid demonstration is quite likely far more effective than a technical or ideological rant about privacy.

[vectorpush]

He calls the people who use this app creeps and stalkers, yet he downloads it, shows it to a table of his friends, then writes about it. Comes off as a completely hypocritical white knight.

Wow! He downloaded an app and then showed it to people before writing about it. What exactly is hypocritical about that? I agree that the tone of the article is a little strange and posting photos of the women was unnecessary, but I don't see how downloading an application and showing it to people makes him a hypocrite.

[angersock]

If you read his conclusion (I know, that's a lot of words down there, but do try to manage the slog!) you see that he advocates downloading the app and showing it off to people to help them realize what's going on.

Where did you get the "white knight" business from?

[i_cannot_hack]

Please, read the whole article before commenting.

>So I’m writing about it now. Not because Girls Around Me is an evil app that should be pulled from the iOS App Store, or because the company that makes it — Moscow-based i-Free — is filled with villains. I still don’t believe that there’s anything wrong with what this app is doing, and the guys at i-Free are super nice, and certainly don’t mean for this app to be anything beyond a diversion.

If you have read this, then you misunderstood him completely. He very clearly states that the creators of the app are not villains.