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like Foursquare are an integral aspect of smartphone ownership. More than 18 percent of smartphone owners use some sort of geo-social service (as of February 2012), a number up 33 percent in one year, with heaviest use concentrated among the young. Importantly, more than 70 percent of smartphone owners use
some
sort of location-based service on the phone, even if it is just the GPS. 13
    These apps change the way users perceive and interact with their environment as well as the way actors in that environment interact with them. Geo-social apps work to raise the net awareness level inany neighborhood or room. Today, most of this added social intelligence is of limited value at best. But the situation is evolving rapidly.
    The rising popularity of these apps, which is closely connected to smartphone adoption in general, promises a big change in our expectations of privacy. There’s inevitability to this. As more people buy smartphones, more people use them the way the devices were designed to be used, with geo-social and location-aware apps. Wearable computing, if it eventually replaces what we know today as cell phones, will further enable this trend. We want to know more about the environment we’re in, what people on Yelp, contributors on Wikipedia, and friends on Facebook have to say about the place where we’ve arrived. This is what futurist Jamais Cascio calls augmented reality, and what the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) calls situational awareness. It’s also human nature. As our friends, neighbors, nieces, nephews, sons, and daughters submit to the impulse to download an app that uses location information, the opt-out strategy becomes less effective for the rest of us, even those of us who consider ourselves extremely privacy aware.
    We leak data through our friends.
    One of the better-known examples of the accidental surrender of personal information via smartphone—what hacker, author, and astrophysicist Alasdair Allan has dubbed data leakage—involves an app called Path, which was billed as a smarter, leaner, more mobile-friendly answer to Facebook. Started by Facebook alum Dave Morin, the service was launched as a way for users to digitally document comings and goings in the world. This was your path. The service worked a lot like Facebook except that users were limited to 150 friends, based on the theory that 150 is the maximum amount of useful acquaintances that a person is capable of maintaining. These people would receive the premium subscription to your ongoing life story. Path received angel-investor funding from the likes of Ashton Kutcher and after tweaking the service a bit, it went from 10,000 users to 300,000 in less than a month. 14 , 15 The service today has more than 10 million users.
    Path was a hit because it seemed to provide the sort of intimate,authentic, and secure sharing experience that Facebook couldn’t offer once users had to have different privacy settings for bosses, English teachers, mothers-in-law, et cetera. The sharing and posting on Path felt intuitive. Turns out it was a bit too intuitive.
    Before long, a Singapore-based developer named Arun Thampi discovered that the ease of interfacing came at a high cost. Thampi was playing around with the code when he discovered something unusual. “It all started innocently enough,” he wrote on his blog. “I was thinking of implementing a Path Mac OS X app as part of our regularly scheduled hackathon . . . I started to observe the various API calls made to Path’s servers from the iPhone app . . . I observed a POST request to https://api.path.com/3/contacts/add. Upon inspecting closer, I noticed that my entire address book (including full names, emails and phone numbers) was being sent as a plist to Path. Now I don’t remember having given permission to Path to access my address book and send its contents to its servers, so I created a completely new ‘Path’ and