Taking bets on how long before geolocation hits Dr. Phil

Finally I’m not alone.

In post today Michelle Greer, one very smart woman, came out and laid it on the line – there is the potential for geolocation to become one of our worst nightmares. Ever since the whole idea of geolocation first started to be mentioned and before it became a game I have been saying that this might not be such a good idea.

Anyway Michelle starts off her post with a personal story of geolocation going wrong and how scary it was t hat some person out there could follow you around via friending people on all these social media services, including the geolocation oriented ones, and there was nothing you could do about it.

She continues with this bit of a warning

Here’s the scoop: it doesn’t matter if you think you aren’t going to be stalked. By accepting friend requests from people who you don’t know in any way shape or form, you are jeopardizing yourself along with all of your friends. Why? Imagine I hang out with Person A a lot. Person A befriends Person Q who just so happens to be someone who makes me feel generally unsafe or uncomfortable. Person Q can generally assume that they can hang around along the peripheral of Person A and eventually, I’m going to show up. Thanks a lot, Person A. You’ve just put me in harm’s way because you like the idea of having a million friends on FourSquare. That sucks.

I’m going to go a little further out on this limb and predict that at some point someone is going to be badly hurt and it will be directly attributable to these geolocation games and services. You can slough it off all you want and make fun of me all you want but trust me – it will happen. then when it does maybe being the mayor of some coffeeshop and a collection of digital badges that are worth squat won’t seem all that much fun.