Foursquare definitely is a cool and exciting service. If you own a restaurant, you can use Foursquare to promote physical location of your site. But as with many other social services out there, Foursquare also poses some security risks that you need to recognize this early before it's too late. Let me just point out some worst things you can do in Foursquare that might put you in a disaster at the end:
4 Dangers in Foursquare - Foursquare Security Tips
1. Adding your home address in Foursquare.
Your home must be the safest place on earth, but if you let your home's location known to everyone, you're exposing yourself to dangers. Foursquare can rightly point out your physical location, and if you append your home's location to Foursquare' database, you'll have a greater chance of being attacked. So, you need to think many times before adding your house on Foursquare, or else your privacy might get violated.
2. Checking in banks
Foursquare is a game of mayorships and badges. So the more checkins you have, the more badges/mayorships you earn. If you're in a bank pulling out some cash (and it's your first time in that branch), you might get tempted to checkin and share your location to your friends. Checking in banks actually is a big no-no. Security experts discouraged you to do that. You should know the danger of going out to banks especially if you're alone.
3. Adding your kids location
You don't want your kids to fall in the trap of bad guys. Kidnapping, sexual assaults, and many other forms of crimes are on the rise. So never was it cool to broadcast current location of your child, be it in school, park, etc. You can, however, append your checkin at later time should you need to earn more points for badges/mayorships.
4. Making your checkins, profile publicly available
Another worst thing you can do in Foursquare is to make your checkins (as well as profile) publicly available. Make sure you know the person you're trying to interact with. Be wary with information you share and make sure you limit access to your account's page. Read Foursquare's security/privacy policies first if you're too concerned about your privacy.
Foursquare is useful in a wide variety of ways. But as with many other social web services like Facebook, it can also be as destructive as what you might not think it is. Foursquare also poses dangers that users need to watch out. You don't need to tell the world where in the side of earth you are. So, to avoid any form of abuse or attacks, think before you post! You need to curb you checkin habits!
If you've your own version of Dos and Dont's in Foursquare, or you've something to share, please leave them as comments below. By the way, I'm also at Foursquare - let's connect! Thanks for reading! :)
