It’s Halloween, and nowhere more obviously so than in San Francisco.
This is my first 31st October as a resident of the United States and I have to say, the effort you yanks go to in celebrating the ancient Celts’ holy evening is truly astounding. Every corner store, diner, dry cleaners, police station, library and undertakers has embraced the – uh – spirit, adorning their windows with spray-on cobwebs and pumpkins and sparkly witches hats and coffins. (Although, to be fair to the undertakers, the coffins are sort of a year-round thing.)
We celebrate All Hallows’ Eve in the UK too of course, and like most things on our side of the Atlantic it’s just as commercial, albeit with more irony and a better accent. But the real difference back home is that Halloween is an evening – just one evening, not a whole fucking month – aimed squarely at kids. Here, by contrast, it seems to be something far more grown-up. Something far more – well – creepy.
For the past two nights, the streets around my hotel have been swarming with drunken adults dressed as hookers. Witchy hookers, ghosty hookers, piratey hookers (Captain Hookers?) and even – I’m pretty sure – hookery hookers. And that’s just the men. My hotel is just a rock’s throw from the Tenderloin and for once it’s the actual working girls who are tutting with disapproval wondering what has happened to the neighbourhood. (I can just imagine the adult revellers leaving home and being given a stern lecture from their kids, reminding mom and dad not to take candy from anyone dressed as a slutty Care Bear, lest they wake up the next morning, hungover and bleeding in the back of a van decorated to look like the Mystery Machine.)
But – hell – when in the bacchanalia, right? For the past couple of weeks my Facebook inbox has been filling up with invitations to some of the four billion Halloween parties taking place in the Bay Area tonight, and it would be churlish of me to boycott them just because they’ll be full of beautiful American women dressed – literally and figuratively – to kill. Like most sensible people, though, I’ve waited until the last minute before deciding which to attend. Really, thanks to tools like Foursquare, Twitter and Facebook, there’s no need to plan ahead at all – I can just wait to see where the heat is, and head there.
Indeed, the party scene in San Francisco, probably more so than in any city on earth – except maybe Tokyo and Circuit City – runs on technology. For people like me who love everything about social media, this is definitely a good thing. But it’s also the reason why I’m genuinely worried that when the dark side of our blithe attitude towards sharing physical location finally reveals itself, it will probably happen here.
And what better night for dark things to reveal themselves, than Halloween?
Social media parties turning bad are old news. Every few months the media gleefully reports on parents who leave their children home alone for the weekend, only to return to a major crime scene when their offspring’s unsanctioned house-party ends up going viral on Facebook and being crashed by thousands. There are even organised groups – with bizarre names like the ‘Facebook Republican Party‘ – who scour social networks for party information in the hope of showing up and causing merry hell.
But when something like that happens, the cause is usually the same – the idiot teenagers who organised the party didn’t think twice before posting their address online; much like they don’t think of the consequences when they create a Facebook group to share their new cellphone number. It’s just a question of educating these ‘digital natives’ on what’s appropriate to share, and what isn’t – as previous generations had to be warned about creepy old men bearing puppies. The innocence and idiocy of youth isn’t what worries me – they’ll grow out of it soon enough.
What worries me is the growing idiocy of otherwise mature adults, particularly when it comes to location.
In the past month or so, I’ve had conversations with two friends who have organised private parties at their homes for small groups of friends. In both cases the hosts created online invitations but sensibly ensured that any date and location information was only visible to invited guests. Yet within minutes of the first guests arriving, they were alarmed to discover that all of their privacy efforts were for naught. Their guests – their friends – had used Foursquare to check in at the party, thus instantly adding their address to the service’s growing database of highly specific locations.
From that point on, a simple search on the Foursquare site for the hosts’ name provides their full home address, along with a handy map for anyone who feels like breaking in and murdering them in their sleep. To make matters even worse, as more partygoers checked in – all caught up in the game element of this thing, and hoping to become mayor of someone else’s living room – the information was repeatedly pushed out via Twitter. If Foursquare had a ‘Breathtakingly Irresponsible’ badge, there would have been a whole lot of recipients at those parties.
And if there’s one night when you don’t want your address pushed out to the world, it’s Halloween. I remember one year – when I was maybe fourteen – a rumour went around my school that someone had found our much-hated maths teacher’s address in the local phone book. A plan was hatched to show up there on the pretense of trick or treating, but really just to throw eggs at their house, car and – hopefully – head. Of course the plan came to nothing; teachers are rightfully careful about putting their address in the phonebook. Tonight, if I were a teacher who has ever invited a tech-savvy friend to my home, I’d be shitting myself. They might have taken every logical step to stay safe but – like the rest of us – they’re still at the mercy of the most idiotic common denominator amongst their friends.
Over the next few hours, particularly in San Francisco, thousands of people will be checking in at hundreds of house parties. It’s not a huge leap to assume that a decent number of hosts are going to wake up in the morning to discover that their their home addresses have been gleefully, and probably innocently, shared online by their friends.
So what can be done? Obviously a constitutional right to privacy – and statutory equivalent in other countries – would be nice, but it might be a struggle to get the necessary votes before midnight. Also, good luck in enforcing it in any meaningful way when most of the people sharing the information do so innocently, and the damage can be done so quickly.
A more practical solution would be for all sites and services that accept location-based data to copy Facebook’s lead by toughening up privacy options. Location-based sites owe a particular duty of care to their users – and yet currently the only option available to those who find their home address on Foursquare is to flag the venue as ‘closed’ – which deletes it from search results, but keeps it in the database, still visible to users who know where to look.
It would be almost zero work for the company to add a second flag – perhaps titled “this is my freaking HOUSE” – which immediately deletes an address and prevents it from being re-added without proper verification. Also, given that the problem is usually one of carelessness rather than malice, it wouldn’t hurt to display a warning to those logging in at new venues, reminding them not to list private homes. The fact that Foursquare hasn’t already implemented these basic measures is irresponsible, bordering on shameful.
Really, though, the real answer to retaking control of our own privacy won’t be found in statutory law or in terms of service. In fact, it already exists – tucked away in the small print of the social contract.
Just because you’re addicted to Foursquare, or Twitter, or any other location-driven service, doesn’t mean you have the right to impose your addiction on others. If the party is in a bar, check in to your hearts content – hell, win yourself a badge – but if it’s in someone’s home, put your fucking phone away. You just look like a dork anyway. If we all started thinking a bit more like friends, and a bit less like attention whores, the privacy problem would be solved at a stroke.
Judging by the gang of Harry Potter-themed hookers who just walked past my window, my attempts to convince America that Halloween is a night for children is too little, too late. But let’s at least leave the boneheaded location oversharing to those who aren’t old enough to know better.
Can you remember these type of people back in school who were not exactly super-popular but still threw parties, trying to get some attention and friends?
Thanks to the internet they could now throw the biggest party of all time and look like they got a thousand friends. (anybody else thinking of Twitter?)
“Wow, Steve, didn’t know you had that many friends…?”
Carr doesn’t understand Halloween?
Or Baseball.
Or Driving on other side of road.
Or adequate dental care.
Or that thing called the Sun.
Or NASCAR.
Or Fake Breasts.
Welcome to America, Simp.
Baseball: I do understand it. In the UK we call it rounders, and it’s played by schoolgirls.
Driving: I don’t know what you people think you’re doing in cars here, but if it doesn’t involve a gear-stick it sure as hell isn’t driving.
Dental care: almost everyone in the UK has private dental. It’s about the only aspect of our healthcare that isn’t a basic human right. Sorry, “Socialism”.
The Sun: I live in SF, and it was dark tonight at 5:30. I still don’t understand the sun.
NASCAR and Fake Breasts: Actually, no, you’re right, I don’t understand either of these.
Good observational humo(u)r though. You’re here all week, tip my waitress.
He’s living in a hotel in the Tenderloin, for gods sake. And he is a lush. I’m pretty sure that the only thing he understands is whores and hangovers.
Paul, what was the address of that hotel?
Yeah, probably not going to answer that.
Also, I said it was *near* the Tenderloin. You’re right, though, hotels in the tenderloin suck: http://www.clifthotel.com
As for the lush comment, I gave up drinking a while back. At least *try* to pay attention to my personal life if you’re going to use it as the basis of anonymous personal attacks.
http://www.paulcarr.com/drink
You imbecile.
Dude, I so concur http://twitter....atus/5260520493
“Judging by the gang of Harry Potter-themed hookers who just walked past my window, my attempts to convince America that Halloween is a night for children is too little, too late.”
Photos or it didn’t happen.
Fear mongering or privacy issue? I dunno.
You say: “If we all started thinking a bit more like friends, and a bit less like attention whores, the privacy problem would be solved at a stroke.”
-> The thing is:
Facebook, Twitter, et al. WANT us to be attention whores SELLING OUT both our own privacy and the privacy of our friends…
They are currently “educating” us to kill the concept of privacy. That is what they want in return for their “FREE” service.
You pay with YOUR privacy and the one of your FRIENDS.
That’s simply the business plan of those companies.
Quite the hyperbole: “breaking in and murdering them in their sleep”. There was thing called the phone book, way back before foursquare.
You could always have an unlisted number, you unfortunately can’t have your house delisted from fourquare etc etc.
I’m not sure psycho-killers look up addresses on these sites, they just follow people around.
Wow.
TL;DR
Sadly would have been an interesting article if you hadn’t written a novel.
Really, is your attention span that short? At what point did we start to celebrate the miniscule attention span we’ve developed and shit upon anyone who has one long enough to write a decent article.
Well by the time he’d checked onto TechCrunch on Foursquare he had no time left to read the article.
Reading is hard.
Or perhaps I should I say, RIH.
Best of luck.
LMFAO
Dude, if you didn’t read it then don’t comment on it.
Time to up your ritalin?
Wow.. I feel so sorry for you.
Life must be so hard with a 30 second attention span.
Not so much tl;dr more than it was too much forced humor; didn’t care to finish.
Funny how anything above 140 characters is too long to read nowadays.
I’m with you Paul on every aspect of this. This is my second halloween in San Francisco and both times I just stay in. I live on Taylor Street near the bar called “swig” and every Friday and Saturday I have to deal with screaming drunk people from 9PM-3AM.
Halloween is worse. My single pane windows and the people outside with foghorns can’t be drowned out by the BOSE speakers and pandora jacked up to ten.
bah-humbug.
on a second note, yeah that’s why i don’t do house parties anymore. too many check ins and I have to many people that really want to know where I live and I can’t let my address get out in public again. This is what happened the last time my address became public knowledge
http://www.sfga.../BA7Q14N5S6.DTL
it’s the gays, isn’t it. they love to throw big, loud parties!
Amen to the whole thing, but especially to that last bit about immature grown-ups misappropriating Halloween.
I’ll not speak of comic books, yet.
wow.. Awesome writing about the absurdity of halloween and the abundance of dumb use of private info online.. Maybe Paul’s next one could include the problem of teenagers’ horrible spelling and grammar.
I spent halloween in Austin (coincidence) and let’s just say that Paul described at least half of the creepy / disturbing / mildly funny alleged adults I saw. As a fellow foreigner (from Latin America), but with many years in the US, I must say the shock and creepiness only increases with each year. Just like the candy at Walmart seems to be more every year (and the crazies fighting over it are anything but kids).
*Some* teenagers as well, we’re not all illiterate.
I think there is a gulf of difference between how the Brits think about privacy (you even say it differently – priv (as in prim) acy) and how North Americans do. In fact, I heard a stat a couple of years ago (can’t be bothered to google it now) that said that something like 65% of North Americans would give up privacy to gain convenience. Exposing ourselves to axe murderers is just not something that keeps us awake at night. Perhaps it’s because we are desensitized. Perhaps it’s because we are short-term thinkers – the ‘instant marshmallow’ types (that silly experiment with the kids and the marshmallows).
I, personally, give up incredible amounts of privacy for convenience. Hell, I’m recently a NEXUS card holder (and proud). It allows me to skip customs line for a quick scan of my retina. I’m sure there is something incredibly sinister happening with my information, but the sheer joy of by-passing that 2-3 hr lineup of hell the other day made any mass conspiracy to follow my every move worth it.
Even before Twitter and Facebook, word was getting out about house parties. When I was 16 and lived in the middle of nowhere (on a farm 15 minutes outside of a small town in Alberta) and there weren’t even cell phones or the web (we had a party-line), I decided to have a few friends over when my parents were gone for the weekend and it blew up into a several hundred person party that ended in a broken stained glass window and a flooding accident. I invited 10 people over for some spaghetti and beer. I was so rural there wasn’t EVEN AN ADDRESS.
Well, what I was trying to say is that we hardly need these funky online services to attract hordes to a parent-less house. It happened before the internets. The best practice is, as a host, ask your friends to not spread the word and to refrain from checking in if you want to keep a party under wraps.
p.s. The worst case scenario is actually allowing foursquaring/tweeting/facebooking and still having a lame party.
i think it’s easier and more comfortable to be slaughtered in my sleep than when i stay up worrying about it.
Ha!
This is soo true, I was thinking about it when I read the article..
My mother is a Brit expat and all through my childhood we had family battles between Dad + kids (USA) vs Mom’s (UK) ridiculous paranoia about privacy. Closing blinds, alarm systems, locking doors closing windows, phone book listings, etc etc..
I think it has a lot to do with the high prevalence of property theft and burglary in the UK and cultural notions about territory
You can’t stop progress. Let location reign.
Not sure that location services are progress.
excellent article. hope you stay employed for a long time.
There use to be a time when SF was ALWAYS exciting…not just on holidays.
SF is the place to be for Halloween
“….and hoping to become mayor of someone else’s living room”
I have read all the comments and I am still laughing…
The worst part is the pictures of drunk fathers and mothers coming on Facebook today.. Good luck to us all
Reg. Halloween: It’s really only “creepy” in San Fran. and other big liberal cities.
In places like Sacramento, Halloween is a family event.
“If we all started thinking a bit more like friends, and a bit less like attention whores, the privacy problem would be solved at a stroke.”
Thank you! That deserves a TESTIFY BROTHER!
There is a Laurie Anderson song from the ’80s called Language is a Virus. Every time I read about the social media scene, I can’t help but think of a passage from that song which went something like:
They all lived on a island,
that rose up from the sea
and everybody on the island
was somebody from TV
And there was a beautiful view,
that nobody could see,
’cause everybody on the island
was screaming “look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me!”
I loved this article.
I totally disagree with the underlying assumptions, though.
There was a brief period in human history when people had some privacy, or the illusion of it.
It’s disappearing now, and the benefits far outweigh the disadvantages.
Math teachers’ home addresses will be known _ but kids who come bearing spray paint and ill intentions will be identified by their mobile phones and filmed every step of the way.
And so on and so forth.
Boo?
I’m on the opposite side. I moved from Texas to London recently and I was bored stiff this Halloween. Everyone was fully dressed and no political, thought-provoking, or obscene costumes. I will make plans to be in the US next Halloween.
Foursquare is a bottom feeder for the vapid digerati cultists. Lack of privacy and humility is not a flaw, but a feature in its design.
This is the single best comment I have ever read on TechCrunch.
agreed…so densely packed, so true – bravo!
except that despite my decision not to use it, I’ve still had my own apartment added to 4sq when someone came over once and wanted to become the mayor of my living room
Re Halloween. I’m sad that all the old pagan festivals are slowly being appropriated by the disneyfication of our culture. And I’m heartily sick of the endless articles on Make and Engadget and others for what feels like months before hand about how to make your costume/accessory/ornament for the big day. It’s all just one more bit of US cultural imperialism to hate. Halloween goblins, Christmas Elves, Easter Bunnies, BURN THEM, I say, BURN THEM IN THE WICKER MAN!
However, if the culture is twisting the festival from Disney and Hallmark cards into a riotous mob of drunken revelry, then I have to applaud. A shaman out of the dark ages, out of their mind on cider, mushrooms, and belladonna and celebrating one of the great festivals of the year would have recognised the Dionysian aspects.
As for location and privacy, the guys behind Fireeagle understood all this. It’s a real shame the rest of the industry is so naive in it’s race to exit and monetisation. (see above about cultural imperialism!).
Well, I might give a pass to Easter Bunnies, the hare was the messenger of Ä’ostre (also Ä’astre) the Pagan Goddess.
Otherwise I heartily agree.
Paul, resident of the US?
I thought you’d be on some sort of visa… can’t believe they gave you a green card so fast
Resident, not citizen. Subtle but important difference. Even as a Green card holder myself I’m still only a resident and not a citizen. Got to wait for a few more years before I can apply for citizenship.
Welcome to American Halloween, Paul. I have to say, you picked the #1 place for the most freaky halloween experience. SF definitely takes the event to a whole new level compared to the rest of the U.S.
Some would say it’s always Halloween in SF (at least us Bostonians would).
I think you’re missing an important point when it comes to privacy. Our houses already exist. If you’re a thief, you don’t need to look at Foursquare to know that a property exists, you can just walk past it, or find it on a map. Having your address shared on Foursquare creates no extra security risk, unless you leave your front door wide open and let anyone walk in, in which case you have bigger issues to worry about anyway.
That’s not the point. The point is some people are more of a target than others. Hence my teacher point. The same is true for wealthy ceos, controversial journalists, political figures etc. It’s not just about theft.
I don’t think those types of people spend time with the type of person who would check in with Foursquare or obsessively update their Facebook/Twitter status. Outside of San Francisco, people just don’t behave like that. In fact, I’d say that even outside of the tech circle in SF, people don’t behave like that. It’s juvenile, a waste of time, and frankly, lame. Most successful people, including “wealthy ceos, controversial journalists, political figures etc.” earn their position through the practice of discretion. People who run their mouths are generally thought of as liabilities and cut out of the inner circle quickly. New Media famewhores like yourself may never understand that concept, but then again, you will never be invited to the real dance, so maybe one day you’ll figure it out.
That said, I think the main point you are trying to make has legs. However, the way you go about arguing your point is ridiculous. Either way, if your classless enough to hang out with egotistical social media whores, you deserve whatever comes to you.
Hello again ‘anon’ – you really do have a bee in your bonnet about ‘new media famewhores’ don’t you? I mean, every week you comment similar on my column. Odd how the name ‘anon’ never seems to be on the guest list to this ‘real dance’ you speak of.
Anyway…
“Outside of San Francisco, people just don’t behave like that.”
Garbage. Prior to February I lived in London and it was no different there. The point is not about the discretion of those CEOs, journalists etc. It’s about those who happen to know where they live. That could be the UPS guy, their kids’ friends or a relative. How precisely could they be cut out of the inner circle?
Well, my comments to your last two posts have been similar because your last two posts have been similar in nature. That said, my main point is that you live in a bubble and interact with a very specific subset of people who embrace this type of technology and lifestyle. You can call them whatever you want, but without specifically referencing that thing that you love to reference, you seem to be more than happy using the term ‘new media whore.’ Whether in SF, London, etc., you will be interacting with these people (slutty Care Bear?), so you will see this behavior. However, as a journalist (*cough*), you need to understand that the way you and your friends live life does not apply to everyone. It’s a great jumping off point to write an opinion piece, but at some point you have to get into the grit and build a sound argument.
Now, I won’t fully dismiss your point about ‘the UPS guy, their kids’ friends or a relative,’ but people who would really need to live a private lifestyle tend to surround themselves with similar types of people and are of a certain class and practice a certain type of behavior. Again, the key word here is discretion. That doesn’t root out all of the bad seeds like the riffraff friends or the Foursquare using UPS guy, but in most cases it is sufficient, and when these people are caught divulging private information, heads will roll. This is simply how things work. If you mess with the boss, you get canned.
For the record, I’m ‘anon’, because I like to practice this type of discretion. I’m not a big-time CEO or necessarily anyone of importance, but one day I’d like to be. Call me a ‘troll’, call me whatever, I’m just trying to protect myself while still engaging in the conversation. If I didn’t think you had anything to say or that in some way your argument had legs, I wouldn’t respond to you at all.
@anon
“People who would really need to live a private lifestyle tend to surround themselves with similar types of people and are of a certain class and practice a certain type of behavior”
Friends of the wife of the new head of the intelligence services in the UK recently posted identifying details of her husband and where they live on Facebook.
I don’t think you’re a troll, I think you leap to assumptions about me and then lecture me on my assumptions.
Anon, will you marry me? Seriously, thank you. (And marry me.)
To prevent the scenario of your guest’s posting your home’s location to FourSquare, you could buy and operate a cellphone radio frequency “jammer” in your home when you have guests over.
Would a “slutty attention whore” be a redundant costume?
I’m half and half with you here – while I like my privacy and am sensitive about having my address posted on the interweb (and I just had to ask someone AGAIN not to post it on a website),
I like dressing up for Halloween and always have. I don’t see the harm in a grown-up masquerade party – it’s not like this is a new thing or even an American thing. Haven’t you heard of Carnivale? Adults have been in on dressing in outlandish and even racy costumes for centuries if not longer. Seriously, if you don’t like costumes, don’t wear one, but get over it already.
Attention axe murderers: I’m going to publish some names and addresses.
Someone named “John” lives at 3074 West 55th St in Seattle.
Someone named “Bethany” lives at 802 First Ave in San Diego.
It’s just unfortunate that these kinds of hyperventilating posts weren’t around when Navin R. Johnson made the fateful decision to list his name in the phone book.
Yeah, you don’t really understand any part of what I’m saying, do you?
The point is not knowing that someone lives somewhere. The point – which I made with my teacher example – is being able to find out where a specific person you might have a vendetta against lives.
Also, I specifically differentiated from the phone book (as did another commenter above) by the fact that you get to decide whether to be listed in the phone book, but with foursquare anyone can add you.
Sarcasm is brilliant, but you really need to understand your subject first.
Take the stick out of your arse, you uptight limey twit.
Looks like the intellectuals have arrived.
Amazing how many people’s comments are reacting to Paul’s opinion about Halloween rather than the crux of the article.
I agree – geo-location services need to be much more careful about publishing location sensitive information. And when someone gets killed because of it, there will be public outcry to regulate it. Perhaps Twitter, FourSquare and the other popular location aware services need to discuss these issues before GeoWeb 2010 – http://geowebconference.org/
One point not mentioned but it came up for me last Halloween: if you add photos to the geo-location mix (easy to pull up people’s party photos on Flickr), you not only get to see where a specific person lives, but you also get photographic details of the interior of their houses, replete with information for casing the joint, etc.
I have no idea, but Halloween is a scary time of year, some crazy stuff happens.
‘vapid digerati cultists’ – nice turn of phrase; certainly more imaginative than ‘Take the stick out of your arse, you uptight limey twit.’
i wonder if your american readers appreciate your british spelling
Who cares?
Happy Halloween.
Better accents my ass!
That’s “arse”. Prosecution rests.
Is Paul Carr really living in a hotel?
Yes.
That’s cool in a writer sort of way, but not too cool in a mental health/personal finance sort of way.
Keeps the axe murderer section of his readership on their toes though.