You Think Foursquare is a privacy risk?  Try going to Harriton High School.

With the interwebs buzzing about privacy and location, we couldn’t resist pointing out one suburban Philly high school’s hamfisted and Big Brotherish attempt to spy on its students.

Here is what we know so far.

Harriton High gives out laptops to its students.

These laptops are equipped with remotely controllable webcams, allegedly for anti-theft purposes.

A student with one of said laptops got in trouble for “improper behavior” at home.  The evidence?  A photo snapped by his laptop.

The parents of said students have sued the school.

The FBI is now investigating.

Know what this sounds like to me?

Exactly. 
This is eerily similar to the webcam equipped jackets the aliens gave to human volunteers in the TV show “V,” in order to spy on the resistance.

Are we saying that the administrators from Harriton High in Lower Merion County are aliens?

At this point, we have no comment.

When we read stuff like this, it gets a bit tougher to give Foursquare a hard time for allowing you to knowingly, with your explicit consent, publicly share your location.

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Well we were going to have to talk about this at some point.

If you check in somewhere, you are presumably not home.

And if you are not home and that information is publicly available, someone with bad intentions could try and rob your home.

Oh.  My.  God.

To highlight this opportunity / risk, there is a brand new service called PleaseRobMe that aggregates public check-in data from the Foursquare API via a robber friendly UI complete with location and user name filters.

Does this signal the end of social check-ins?  Will Foursquare and Gowalla have to shift to the MyTown “check-in from the comfort of your own couch” model?

Probably not, but it is forcing very young services to handle sensitive PR issues early in their development.

Anybody who uses social media a lot knows that there are plenty of ways you can get yourself in trouble by oversharing.  Tweeting about those difficult term sheet negotiations.  Posting pictures of yourself in drag while at a Tea Party rally.  Threatening people.

But the stakes are a little higher with location because there is such a direct real world tie in.  Making an effort to minimize those risks without scaring away new users or throttling growth will be a difficult, sensitive challenge for these tiny start-ups.

Of course the risks exposed by PleaseRobMe are probably a bit overstated.  Access to perfect information isn’t the only factor that prevents people from becoming robbers.  There’s stuff like the law, ethics, competence, laziness, etc.

Plus, about 90% of the population leaves their home on a regular, predictable basis to go to work, which isn’t generally considered a security risk.  And many people who are checking in have roommates.  And pity the poor robber who tries to rob Krazy Dad because of an inside tip he was at the North Pole.  Etc.

Security and privacy issues have been raised before in regards to social check-ins.  On this blog, Chad has talked about the “creepy line” when you combine friending and location, and there was also the location based service suicide chatter.

But the questions raised by PleaseRobMe are good ones and represent the most aggressive, direct communications challenge for the social check-in space yet.  Clearly these questions were going to have to be answered eventually if social check-ins had any chance of going mainstream.

Here’s to hoping that Foursquare and Gowalla do a good job of handling this little media firestorm.

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