Geononymity, Geoprivacy, and Geopublicy

Andrew Hyde is the newest (but not the only, or last) to drop out of the social geolocation wave:

Yesterday I checked in for my last time.  I’m done.  No more BrightKite, FourSquare or Gowalla.  I was an early user on all three of the services, and am quitting cold turkey.

But why? (and why would anyone care…)

Well, why anyone would care can only be pointed to me just being a point of data as a heavy user leaving the services. I was a poweruser.  878 posts on Brightkite, 703 checkins on Foursquare, 54 stamps with Gowalla, and I had enabled geotagging on my twitter account and posted over 2000 messages.

Simply: too much work and risk, too little reward.

All I got were quite a few stalker like experiences grouped with a shift of my thinking about location based services from expression of physical identity to needless ego boost.

via andrewhy.de

Andrew has snapped from being very geopublic to a new state of ‘geononymous’, as my friend Ed Simnett styles it. Basically, Andrew had someone (or someones?) stalk him based on his geoclues. And now, like someone who’s house was burgled after posting their travel plans on Facebook, he’s done.

I am fairly public about my comings and goings, but even I don’t push every movement. I have set Google Latitude to publish on the city level, but nothing of finer grain. I personally might post that I have ‘just landed in /NYC’ or that I am chilling in my office, or the hotel I have checked into. But I am sporadic, at best.

And I certainly haven’t succumbed to the charmless inducements of Foursquare and Gowalla, who seem to be based on some gaming DNA I just don’t have.

But I think that Andrew needs finer grained controls of his geoclues, not no clues at all. I know that some people will opt for full-on geopublicy — where basically every time they cross a threshold the world will hear of it — but most others would like a more private model — geoprivacy — where only those that are trusted by one can find out where you are.

I am surprised that Andrew’s turned from Brightkite, since that level of control is something they shine at: they provided a private toggle, where only those that you have chosen to know your every move will see where you are once it is flipped. He could simply flip the switch forever.

But opting out altogether is the surest way to reach geononymity, and that seems to be what Andrew wants. At least for now.