On the wake of the much anticipated launch of Facebook’s GeoLocation Application onto its social networking site, a potential competitor in the name of Foursquare has churned out more or less a defensive marketing warfare strategy. In order to secure its market position in the Location Service business, Foursquare has updated its privacy settings and also added pages that enables users to know better as to which of their information is being publicly shared. The need of such a feature rose out of chaos created due to constant information updates confusing users as to what is actually being shared and where exactly it is shared.
These freshly updated privacy settings facilitate users to conceal their personal contact details like phone numbers, email address, home or office addresses, etc. This could seem as a normal privacy setting that exists in any social networking website, but the strong point here is the ability given to users to conceal select detail even from friends and along with this, users also have the choice to opt out of platforms like ‘Who’s Here’ or ‘Mayorships’. There is a tendency of audiences not completely understanding the working of such privacy settings for which Foursquare has incorporated the Privacy 101 guide into its privacy policy and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) sections of its website.
Supplementary to this, Foursquare has also ported a grid chart to its site which renders information detailing out every update of yours on your Foursquare profile which can also be shared with friends and peers. Though the grid looks more alike to that of Facebook’s, it also provides facts of the user’s existing personal settings and also the status of his/ her defaults and how the user can change them. In addition to this, Foursquare’s latest privacy setting in light of reducing user confusion would give access only to the user’s recent data. That is, Foursquare would save the latest update of the user, until he/ she logs into the application next at which time all old data would be erased leaving only the latest location update to be visible.
It is but natural for a business organization to undertake an important step towards retaliating against any competing firm that arrives newly in the market. What needs to be answered here is if its focus on Privacy Settings alone is enough for Foursquare to compete with Facebook and its idea of entering into the Location Service business. The revisions made to Foursquare’s privacy forum could well clear certain allegations that claim the existence of loopholes in the privacy setup; but it would take more than just modifying your privacy settings to put up a fight against the number one Social Networking Site. Foursquare should nevertheless be appreciated for having taken a step that has come quicker than expected, to counter the anticipated entry of Facebook into the Location Service market.
