It is not the first time that someone was caught cheating with the help of a location finder or a GPS app.
However, the latest home-wrecking app seems to be iOS 5‘s ‘Find My Friends’ and geeks who like to gossip are having a field day at MacRumors.com, as I write this. Apparently, a man who lives in New York City decided to share to the world (or the gossip-loving geeky Apple fanboys at MacRumors.com) his wife’s whereabouts as she cheated on him, literally.
Within a span of 20 minutes, the NYC man goes ballistic and sends her text messages asking where she is, and at the same time spies on her by using ‘Find My Friends’ app, which was installed on the new iPhone 4S he had bought for her. The poor lady replies after 20 minutes that she found a cab and that she hates meat packing. She must have packed in a lot of meat in those twenty odd minutes, or so thought the husband. He decided that the lady was cheating on him, and that he would have the last laugh, all thanks to the smart ‘Find My friends’ app.
Hilarious as it might be, privacy-watchers have long questioned the utility of GPS-enabled apps which let your friends, lovers and family members track your location based on where you are. Those who might want to hide their activities and their location should make sure to switch off the app, and to disable location finding, as ‘Find My Friends’ does allow you to do that. Unfortunately, not everyone is all that tech-savvy and most do not understand the domestic complications of turning on the GPS especially when they are out packing some meat.
This incident seems tragic to me, especially for the woman who might not even have cheated on her over-zealous and paranoid man, and must have just wanted to keep her location a secret and failed to do so, because she didn’t know how to. It must be a lesson for all of you who use location based apps to make sure that you disable these apps when you would like to keep your whereabouts a secret, as you never know how your location information might be used against you. There really is something called privacy, and it all depends on how you learn to protect it!
