Foursquare Also Trying to Kill Egyptian Dissidents
15th February 2012
The surface evidence is clear – I created a new foursquare account on my iPhone and it immediately told me that 402 of my contacts were on Foursquare and suggested I connect with them.
There are theoretical (but highly unlikely) ways Foursquare could connect me with them without uploading my contacts, but it’s highly unlikely. So a developer I know went to the trouble to proxy the iPhone through Charles Proxy to sniff the traffic. It showed a substantial amount of data being uploaded to Foursquare from the phone immediately before the screen above was shown with contact information. We perused that data, and it included email addresses and phone numbers for everyone in the phone contacts.The surface evidence is clear – I created a new foursquare account on my iPhone and it immediately told me that 402 of my contacts were on Foursquare and suggested I connect with them.
There are theoretical (but highly unlikely) ways Foursquare could connect me with them without uploading my contacts, but it’s highly unlikely. So a developer I know went to the trouble to proxy the iPhone through Charles Proxy to sniff the traffic. It showed a substantial amount of data being uploaded to Foursquare from the phone immediately before the screen above was shown with contact information. We perused that data, and it included email addresses and phone numbers for everyone in the phone contacts.