It's fascinating to imagine what the tech world might look like with no (or radically different) IP laws. I doubt it would be anywhere near as simple as the blog author makes out.
Don't worry. Once China and India have a sufficient manufacturing, services and consumer base, I fully expect them to formally declare IP to be a nonsense and an impediment to growth.
to <MYNAME>
Right, yes, we do send info to the server but do not save anything. All foursquare pages are encrypted as of April 6.
<MYNAME> ✆ via gmail.com
20/07/2011
to <FOURSQUARE-SUPPORT>
It's nice to know your pages are encrypted, but my question relates to when you sent all my contacts to your server from your mobile app. Did it use an encrypted connection to do this?
to <MYNAME>
yes, any information sent via any foursquare page, mobile or otherwise, is encrypted.
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<MYNAME> ✆ via gmail.com
20/07/2011
to <FOURSQUARE-SUPPORT>
Thanks for the confirmation.
One final thing - it would be polite for your app to request permission before scanning my phone and uploading all my contacts to your server. Please consider it a complaint that it did not ask permission.
to <MYNAME>
We totally agree! When you download foursquare, we list the permissions that you are giving us, including scanning your contacts list (which we do not save or store). See here: http://cl.ly/18433L2s3g1T13070y0X.
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<MYNAME> ✆ via gmail.com
21/07/2011
to <FOURSQUARE-SUPPORT>
We don't agree.
It is not made clear that you are going to scan for my contacts and upload them.
You should explicitly make me aware and ask for permission in advance of doing that.
Furthermore, your tone and wilfully ignoring my legitimate complaint is annoying.
to <MYNAME>
<MYNAME>,
I'm sorry you feel that way! I have spent time talking to four different engineers (two server engineers about what info is stored and how information is transferred, and two Android developers) about your questions out of respect and concern for you as a user with a valid query. I take all user questions and concerns seriously and as a member of the Product team, pass on this sort of complaint so that we can be sensitive to that fact that if one person is asking/upset about something, there are probably others. Sorry if I did not do a good job of conveying the way I run community and support for foursquare in my tone. Sometimes email is hard in that sense. I hope you know that we care and appreciate your emails.
to <MYNAME>
Also, since we don't save your contacts in anyway, I'm not sure that we are actually "uploading" them. Is there something else that is bothering you? Perhaps I'm not understanding your concern completely--we aren't telling your contacts that you are using foursquare nor are we automatically adding them as your friends, we're merely searching your phone's contacts for other people you know who are also using foursquare so that you can then decide which of those you'd like to send a friend request to. Can you please let me know what part of this you find troubling so I can pass on your concerns? Thank you!
<MYNAME> ✆ via gmail.com
21/07/2011
to <FOURSQUARE-SUPPORT>
Uploading means essentially the same thing as sending for the purposes of this complaint.
uploading: present participle of up·load
Verb: Transfer (data) to a larger computer system.
As for my concern, I can only repeat myself. It is disappointing that you don't immediately understand why this is a problem.