Tag: geolocation

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Bell¿ngcat explains how Untappd beer check-ins can disclose more than you’ve thought about your work. Like how Strava running logs disclosed e.g. military camp locations, Untappd can be similarly used to surface the travel history, frequent locations and home location of sensitive personell. In short: sharing your location provides patterns to interested parties. Always, and everywhere. (via Roel)

I share locations sometimes, as it may help create meet-ups with people I know that happen to be near as well. It happens frequently enough to make it interesting to share location when I am outside my usual patterns and willing to be ‘found’. Inside my usual patterns it doesn’t help to share location, as it won’t create additional serendipity. At IndieWebCamp Utrecht last year, Rose worked on making location check-ins more ephemeral, meaning they are visible for a short specified time, and not available as a history of check-ins.

In reply to IndieWebCamp Utrecht by Jeremy Cherfas

Jeremy, is Compass php and mysql? In other words, should it be able to work on any basic hosting package? (Some of the more intriguing indieweb bits require more server access than I have on my hosting packages). And what was the brick wall about?

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Kilroy black edited

Social geolocation services over the years have been very useful for me. The value is in triggering serendipitous meetings: being in a city outside my normal patterns at the same time someone in (or peripheral to) my network is in the city too, outside their normal patterns. It happened infrequently, about once a year, but frequently enough to be useful and keep checking in. I was a heavy user of Plazes and Dopplr, both long since disappeared. As with other social platforms I and my data quickly became the marketable product, instead of the customer. So ultimately I stopped using Foursquare/Swarm much, only occasionally for international travel, and completely in 2016. Yet I still long for that serendipitous effect, so I am looking to make my location and/or travel plans available, for selected readers, through this site.

There are basically three ways in which I could do that.
1) The POSSE way. I post my location or travel plan on this blog, and it gets shared to platforms like Foursquare, and through RSS. I would need to be able to show these postings only to my followers/ readers, and have a password protected RSS feed and subscription workflow.
2) The PESOS way. I use an existing platform to create my check-ins, like Foursquare, and share that back to my blog. Where it is only accessible for followers/readers, and has a password protected rss feed.
3) The ‘just my’ way. I use only my blog to create check-ins and share them selectively with followers and readers, and have a password protected rss feed for it.

Option 3 is the one that provides the most control over my data, but likely limits the way in which I can allow others to follow me, and needs a flexible on-the-go way to add check-ins through mobile.
Option 2 is the one that comes with easy mobile apps, allows followers to use their own platform apps to do so, as well as through my site.
Option 1 is the one that is in between those two. It has the problems of option 3, but still allows others to use their own platforms like in option 2.

I decided to try and do both Option 2, and Option 3. If I can find a way to make Option 3 work well, getting to Option 1 is an extension of it.
Option 2 at first glance was the easiest to create. This because Aaron Parecki already created ‘Own Your Swarm‘ (OYS) which is a bridge between my existing Foursquare/Swarm account and Micropub, an open protocol for which my site has an endpoint. It means I can let OYS talk both to my Swarm account and my site, so that it posts something to this blog every time I check-in in Swarm on my mobile. OYS not just posts the check-ins but also keeps an eye on my Swarm check-ins, so that when there are comments or likes, they too get reflected to my blog.

My blog uses the Posts Kinds plugin, that has a posting type for check-ins, so they get their own presentation in the blog. OYS allows me to automatically tag what it posts, which gets matched to the existing categories and tags in my blog.

I from now on use a separate category for location related postings, called plazes. Plazes was the original geolocation app I started using in 2004, when co-founder Felix Petersen showed it to me on the very first BlogWalk I co-organised in the Netherlands. Plazes also was the first app to quickly show me the value of creating serendipitous meetings. So as an expression of geo-serendipic (serendipity-epic?) nostalgia, I named the postings category after it.