Charles Stross on the Girls Around Me app

English science fiction writer Charles Stross expressed his opinion on the free Girls Around Me app, which recently appeared on iTunes. This very simple program by pressing the "radar" button shows the photos and profiles of all the girls who are currently nearby. Information is pulled from Facebook and Foursquare.

Charles Stross does not agree with the opinion of observers that this program from the Russian company SMS Services should be simply banned. According to him, the problem is actually deeper - in the wrong model of social relationships that Facebook promotes, and in fact, people who consider it necessary to disseminate private information about themselves as widely as possible.

Banning this innocent program is easy, says Charles Strauss. But the problem will remain. And if nothing is done with Facebook, then in the future we will see much more terrible programs that will allow killing people, sometimes in large quantities . The simplest thing that comes to mind is the same program “Jews among us”, which modern neo-Nazis can use to carry out pogroms. Similarly, by pressing the "radar" program will show all the people of the wrong nationality with their current coordinates.
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Hiding information about nationality in the profile does not help, because the technology has already appeared to determine the ethnicity of a person . By the way, scientists are also working on an algorithm for determining the sexual orientation of a person according to his social graph Facebook .

One way or another, in the future, Facebook may automate the search for opponents for any kind of ethnic cleansing or political conflict, said Charles Strauss. For example, you can create such a program to search for and destroy the political opposition in the country. The police and special services can do nothing at all, it is enough to issue a program with an indication of goals - and social activists from pro-state "popular" movements will do the rest.

According to Charles Stross, the problem is not in this particular program, but in “the deployment of profit-oriented corporations that use behavioral psychology techniques to induce people to over-search personal information, which can then be aggregated and issued to third parties for targeted marketing.” If someone does not understand, we are talking about Facebook.