3 ms·
What about security? How is this protected from abuse? Why is this all public information? It feels like a honeypot to be honest. My suggestion would be to h
by atmanactive 2y ago
What about security?
How is this protected from abuse? Why is this all public information?
It feels like a honeypot to be honest.
My suggestion would be to hide the names unless visitor is logged in AND there is a match in their city.
- TekMol 2y agoWhat abuse? Your HN profile is public anyhow. All this does is show who put a city in their profile. You could find those via Google as well.
- atmanactive 2y agoI misunderstood then. I thought this is a brand new data collector. Thank you.
- atmanactive 2y agoIn fact, it is a brand new data collector. It's encouraging HN account holders to geo-tag themselves and to put that information in the publicly available HN account profile. This profile is, more or less, blank by default.
- donatj 2y agoIt's all data you chose to share publicly. I wouldn't have put myself on the map if I hadn't been comfortable doing so.
- RadiozRadioz 2y ago> hide the names unless visitor is logged in I hate websites that do this. People know that what they're putting here will be public, they make the judgment themselves if they're okay with that.
- atmanactive 2y agoWhy do you care if the screen shows 5 people in city X (which is not your city anyway)? What use do you have of knowing exact names of people in city X half way acros the globe?
- codingdave 2y agoTravel - it seems that if this app takes off, catching up with people as you travel is a solid use case.
- RadiozRadioz 2y agoIt is interesting to me and others. There's a person living in Vila do Corvo. I didn't know that was a place. What are they interested in? What do the technical people of Vila do Corvo post about? (In this case, not much, but it was fun to find out.)
- atmanactive 2y agoExactly. A _person_. That's enough information to satisfy curiosity. No need to publish exact names.
- RadiozRadioz 2y agoIf I don't know their username, how can I look at what they post about? I think lots of people on HN are curious and inquisitive by nature
- j_maffe 2y agoIt's interesting to know what that person is up to (from what they publically share online).
- Aachen 2y agoThat just gives a false sense of security. Someone who means harm would simply set themselves to each city successively, while people believe it to be private (similar to the location feature in dating apps that keeps being broken to find people's exact addresses). Not that I see what harm there is in associating a username with a (nearby) city when one makes that choice consciously, so it's not like the dating app situation where you (1) believe the location will remain secret and (2) it being revealed means your exact address is now known
- atmanactive 2y agoAn app that would allow an account to change it's location more than 3 times in a year is a broken app in my book.
- tacitusarc 2y agoPeople move all the time. People also often have multiple accounts, which they could use to determine which accounts are located where.
- atmanactive 2y agoThen it would need a GPS-backed proof to allow more location changes while preventing abuse. There's always an intended use case and corner cases which could be handled via support ticket, thus passing through human judgement. If there is a secure app on your phone, then how can you have multiple accounts?
- frde_me 2y agoWell, one answer might be that someone could spin up emulators Or reverse engineer whatever app you have. Or reset their phone? (or would you restrict it somehow to one account per physical phone? What happens if it gets sold or given away?) Having worked in fraud detection a bit, it's _really_ hard to prevent people from making multiple accounts. Short of requiring ID based verification, and even then. And then you have to still not go overboard and keep the onboarding low friction enough that people will be willing to go through it