Find My Friends iOS 5 App Raises Privacy Concerns
Barely a week after being unveiled, the Apple iOS 5 app Find My Friends is already instrumental in breaking up a marriage after a suspicious husband caught his wife cheating.
Find My Friends is an app that lets users to share their location with other iPhone users in the area. With this iOS 5 app you can keep track of all of your friends 24/7. It didn't take long for users to find more creative uses for this app, in this case tracking a cheating spouse.
New York user "Thomas Metz" posted on the 9to5Mac forum about how he turned his iPhone into a private investigator.
"I got my wife a new 4s and loaded up find my friends without her knowing. She told me she was at her friends house in the east village. I've had suspicions about her meeting this guy who lives uptown. Lo and behold, Find my Friends has her right there.
"I just texted her asking where she was and the dumb b!otch said she was on 10th Street!! Thank you Apple, thank you App Store, thank you all. These beautiful treasure trove of screen shots going to play well when I meet her a$$ at the lawyer's office in a few weeks."
Cheating spouses with iPhones will have to find new ways to hide from their spouses, or look for a different smartphone. As inherently funny as this story is it still raises disturbing questions about privacy for Apple iPhone iOS users.
While Find My Friends isn't the only app out there that can let you track people's locations. Google's Latitude has been around for a while, and Foursquare's Radar lets you know when friends come into your area, this Apple app is far more pervasive. The app is a very powerful tool, bringing an unprecedented amount of information about the user to others. Plus anything with an Apple logo these days becomes instantly popular, especially among teenagers. With strong iPhone 4s sales, how many more people will find similar uses for the Find My Friends app?
Privacy has become a burning issue in these days of increasing connectivity. Facebook and other social media have made what was once personal lives fodder for public consumption. Find My Friends is yet another iOS 5 app that can have serious implications. The app does ask the user to accept invitations to share their locations, but what is stopping someone from getting that information or hacking it off your phone? In these evolving times, the question of how much you're willing to share will have to be addressed seriously.