It seems counter-intuitive that, in the thick of a backlash against Big Tech's data privacy abuses, Dennis Crowley is pitching location tracking technology at South By Southwest.
Foursquare, which he co-founded, recently announced Hyperthreading. It's an in-app feature that shows a real-time heat map of where everyone on Foursquare (and the apps that use its technology) are hanging out in Austin. The data is anonymized and aggregated so you don't see how many people are in a particular bar or park.
The feature is limited to this city during SXSW, will be gone by March 21 and there are no plans for a wider release.
So what's the point?
As a means of finding where everyone's hanging out in the city, it's OK -- but even Crowley said in his keynote speech on Saturday that it's not particularly useful.
As a demo of Foursquare's capabilities, it's not showing developers anything too different from the company's pre-existing Pilgrim technology, which allows fine-grained tracking based not just on GPS but WiFi and cell signals.
Instead, it feels more like an art project. To show users the "God view" of their data -- not just their individual information, but the aggregate patterns and analytics that companies look at all the time. Hyperthreading is interesting because giving users a peek behind the veil at the risk of freaking them out is exactly what most tech companies don't do.
Crowley has framed it as a demo for consumers and he wants a cultural read on its acceptability. Do people welcome it? Will they understand it?
"We are limiting access to it because *we know* it's provocative," he wrote upon the feature's release. "It's also our belief that before something like our Hyperthreading demo changes the game, we should try to give everyone a chance to get their head around the rules. So we are looking to get your thoughts and feedback on Hyperthreading as it relates to the larger conversation around the need for transparency, thoughtful leadership, and ethical behavior from technology companies."
Which leads to another reason for Hyperthreading: as Foursquare's trust-building exercise with customers.
Companies today can identify individual citizens from anonymous data, potentially following one to a doctor's appointment and romantic partner's house, all while fueling a location-based advertising market worth $21 billion. Meanwhile, we're trapped in a cycle of data violation/casual apology/new violation a week later. Yet to an increasingly skeptical public, Foursquare is here trying to pitch itself as an ethical tech company.
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