For example, in the demonstration video put together by the show, correspondent Franchesca Ramsey runs in to a couple of app users who said they signed up for Highlight to ‘look for guys’. Remember the outcry over ‘Girls Around Me’ a few weeks ago? Highlight, despite different positioning, seems to provide the same functionality; accessing aggregate location data from Facebook and showing you the people in your immediate vicinity. It also archives people you’ve been around for the past few days…meaning if you’ve checked in somewhere, your information is accessible to people you may not have meant to expose location to for an extended period of time.

One of the nice features of Highlight is that it shows you what you have in common (including friends and ‘likes’), adding some context and perhaps an opportunity for an icebreaker for your random meetings. Still, the recent explosion of location aggregating apps serves as a reminder of how much we’re sharing via social networks these days and how easily accessible this information is either via the social networks themselves or third party apps. Remember, if you want to share your location privately, safely and securely, your safest bet is with Moby!

Check out Anderson’s take on Highlight here, and watch the demonstration of the app in action here. And as always, share your comments with us!

Share your Avatar Picture

Now you can share your avatar picture with your Moby friends!

• Your friends will be notified when you change the photo you use as your Moby avatar, and your picture now shows up in their Moby app.

• View a large version of all your friends avatar pictures

Badges, Badges!

You won’t miss those important Moby notifications from your friends any more.

• On iPhone, the Moby app icon now has a badge showing the number of new notifications you’ve received from friends.

• For Android, the Moby app icon in the status bar now has a badge showing the number of new notifications you’ve received from friends.

“Follow” your friends on the map

We’ve just made it easier to find everyone on the map while you’re on the move.

• Tap and Hold on anyone’s map avatar, and you can choose “Follow on Map” to have the map stay centred automatically on yourself, and any number of friends as you all move around.

New Map Controls and Event History

• Tap your own map avatar to share, see a history of your recent activity and follow your own map avatar.

• We now keep track of your check ins and sharing sessions in the Notification Log

Faster and Easier to Add Friends

• We’ve made it much more simple to add multiple friends to Moby from your Phone’s address book.

To update Moby on your iPhone, use the ‘Updates’ tab in the App Store or click here. For Android, tap the upgrade notification in your Android Notification list, or click here. We think you’ll be thrilled with the new enhancements and features and will agree that this is the best version of Moby yet. Stay tuned for more great enhancements on the horizon.

Let us know what you think of the latest Moby in the comments below!

What does this mean for you, dear Instagram user? Odds are you’ve already been using Instagram’s social sharing feature to post photos to Facebook and Twitter. Did you know that, per Facebook’s Terms of Service: ”For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.”

Yes, you read that correctly: while you retain the IP rights to any photos or videos you upload to Facebook, they retain the right to use it as they so wish. By Facebook’s definition, ‘Use’ can mean: ‘use, copy, publicly perform or display, distribute, modify, translate, and create derivative works of.’

While Facebook maintains that they won’t enable automatic sharing from Instagram to Facebook, the service may fall under Facebook’s all-encompassing Terms of Service (a la Google). For the time being, it’s safe to assume that every photo uploaded to Instagram can be used by Facebook (much the same way it could be used by Instagram back when it was just Instagram). Judging from the Internet backlash, however, it appears people are more trusting when it comes to the ‘little’ guy (even if the little guy in this case has 30 million users).

What are your thoughts on the acquisition? Have you deleted your Instagram account already, or do you intend to? Let us know in the comments!

The scariest thing about the application is how it highlighted ignorance over the sheer amount of location information being shared via public networks such as Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. ‘Girls Around Me’ suffered more from bad PR and positioning than it did from violating any privacy policies. What’s astounding is that there are a variety of apps that function exactly the same as ‘Girls Around Me’ (some of which we discussed here, some of which have enjoyed mostly positive press and have been portrayed as valuable social networking tools.

Ultimately, Girls Around Me shouldn’t be made a scapegoat for our oversharing when it comes to location. While a couple of articles have attempted to frame the concerns about the application as a problem with sexism rather than a problem with privacy, let’s ask ourselves: would ‘Guys Around Me’ or ‘Children Around Me’ really have fared that much better? The outcry may have been somewhat more subdued, but the problem remains: people of both sexes are unwittingly sharing more than they are comfortable with, and when an application like ‘Girls Around Me’ takes advantage of that, it’s inevitable they’ll come under fire for it.

So how can you avoid having you or your children’s location mined by third-party apps?

• First, off, triple-check your Facebook privacy settings to ensure posts are limited to ‘Friends Only’, and when posting status updates or Facebook check-ins, make sure the inline privacy selector is set to ‘Friends’.

• Whenever possible, avoid ‘geotagging’ or adding a location to your tweets, Facebook posts, and Instagram photos.

• If you’re a Foursquare user, you can opt out of the public ‘Who’s here’ information accessed by other apps by unchecking the ‘Include me in the public list of people currently checked in at a venue’ box on your settings page.

• If you MUST communicate or share your location with friends or family members, use a private, closed location sharing app such as Moby to ensure your location information isn’t accessible by a third party.

Above all, always be aware of what you’re sharing and who you’re sharing it with. By following these tips, we can all be safer and avoid applications such as ‘Girls Around Me’ broadcasting our whereabouts without our consent.

How do you feel about ‘Girls Around Me’, and other location sharing applications? Are we sharing too much information at the risk of our safety, or is it all in good fun? Let us know in the comments below!

The new Privacy Policy marks the beginning of Google’s shift to recognizing the multitude of products and services they offer as one. It also means that they’ve now clarified exactly how they share information across multiple sites. Previously,  each site existed as a separate entity. While Google was still sharing information between separate services, they weren’t as transparent in how this information was being shared or utilized. The new policy helps to clarify Google’s practices when dealing with your personal information.

So what’s different?

As of March 1st, Google is a single entity. Whether you’re posting a video to YouTube, sending an email using Gmail, conducting a search, editing a Google Doc, Google is tracking your usage and collecting data. What kind of data, you ask? Well, the policy breaks it down as follows:

• Personal information: This is information you provide when signing up for a Google account, and include your full name, email address, telephone number, and possibly credit card. If you have a publicly visible Google Profile, it may also include your photo.

• Browsing information: This includes information collected from the device you use to access the site (such as device type, browser information, IP address, telephony log information, and OS version). It can also include details of how you used the site (such as clicks, search queries, and more).

• Location information: If using location-enabled Google service (such as Maps or Latitude), Google collects information about your actual location, including information on nearby Wi-Fi access points and cell towers.

• Cookies and anonymous identifiers:  Google uses cookies to identify you when you visit any of their sites, and also when you interact with services they offer to partners, such as advertising services or Google features that may appear on other sites.

What Google does with your information

Now that you know what data Google is collecting from you, how about how they’re using it? Well, a number of ways.

Firstly, they use data collected to improve existing services; this is especially true of the device and site data they collect — they can look at exactly how users are utilizing their services and tailor them to make them better. So far so good, right?

It gets a little shadier when you consider the targeted searches and advertising. Using your personal information combined with your browsing and search history, Google can serve up targeted advertising through any site that runs Google ads. While Google’s Privacy Policy states that they won’t target ads to users based on ‘sensitive categories, such as those based on race, religion, sexual orientation or health’, it appears everything else is fair game. The intent for targeted ads isn’t that malicious, however, it does make you wonder about the massive amount of data Google is collecting on users and just how that data might be used in the future.

In case you were wondering how you could opt out of Google’s data collection? Well, you can’t, short of not using any of Google’s services. But in today’s Google-dominated web experience, that seems unrealistic.  The best you can do is keep your cache and cookies clear, only remain logged in to your Google account when absolutely necessary, and be mindful of the information that Google is associating with you.

Is Google a marketing gold mine or a sinister Orwellian overlord? What do you see the company doing with your information? Let us know in the comments!

The capabilities offered by location sharing technology are a double-edged sword, and when making Moby we had to ask ourselves ‘How do we encourage family members to share their whereabouts with each other while still respecting each individual user’s privacy?’ This meant ensuring that the user always had complete control over when their location was being shared, and who it was being shared with. While we can certainly understand the intent and the need for an application that lets you communicate your location to family members (it is, after all, why we made Moby), we’ve gone about it in a slightly different way, putting location sharing control in the hands of the end user, rather than monitoring them behind the scenes. Without being intrusive or resorting to spying, we believe our app promotes open communication, honesty and trust between family members, and still offers the convenience of apps like Verizon’s Family Locator. Even better? We offer ours for free!

I’m sure we all remember being kids and the (mostly) white lies we told our parents. While mobile technology makes it easier than ever to keep tabs on our children, is it always necessary? Empowering your children with an app like Moby and showing them that you trust them enough to keep you informed can go a lot further than betraying their trust. What do you think?

If you’d like to give Moby a shot, visit us here!

As the press release states, more parents involving themselves in their children’s online social networking means kids and adolescents are adopting more acronyms and codes to convey things their parents might find objectionable. The list is split into categories such as ‘Meet Up Requests’, ‘Sexual Terms’, ‘Cyberbullying’ and ‘Drugs and Drinking’, and parents should definitely acquaint themselves with. We recommend maintaining open and honest communication with your children regarding social media activity and online safety as it can help mitigate dangerous behavior down the road. Ensure that you’re warning them about the potential pitfalls of online communications, especially when on open social networks such as Twitter and Tumblr.

How active a role do you take in your children’s online interactions, and how much is too much? Do you feel it’s necessary to monitor their computer use, and how do you keep tabs on them when they’re out of the house? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

(Via our friends at Techmamas)

With Facebook’s ever-troubling privacy settings, more than just your close friends and family may be witnessing the growth of your baby. Facebook is notorious for updating the website and periodically changing around their privacy settings, resulting in our private information being exposed to more than the people we would be comfortable with. Yes, Facebook did introduce the “Friends” category to help us choose which content to share with who, but lets face it at this point do we really have time/motivation to go through our friends list and organize them? Not to mention there have been breaches where the privacy walls don’t always hold with pictures.

Adding to this mixture is the fact that many of us have ‘friends’ on Facebook who we haven’t seen or spoken to in 15 years, but we are too kind to reject their friendship offer on the social network. Now being a proud mother is one thing, having these semi-strangers looking into the very personal development of the little one is a totally other thing.

As you know, here at Moby we are very big advocates of sharing important information with only those we trust. Another big advocate of this is baby social-networking website: TotSpot

What is TotSpot?

According to their website, TotSpot is a fun, simple, and secure way to create a private website for your baby, toddler, or child, and share it with your friends and family. You can share photos, upload private videos, track milestones, and create growth charts in an easy-to-use and beautiful environment.

Would you ever create a social networking profile for your baby?  Is privacy enough of a motivator for you to not post your baby pictures on Facebook?

Take care and be safe!

Here’s some of the changes we’ve made:

Faster and Smoother: 

• The new Moby app is up to 5x faster to use
• Buttons are easier to read and tap while you’re on the run.
• Handy arrows show you where your friends are on the map in relation to you

See where your friends have been: 

• You can now view older events from your family and friends on the map.
• Moby displays the 100 most recent notifications you’ve received (like Check Ins and Request Check Ins) in your log. That’s 4x as many as before!

After hearing from our community, we decided to remove  the Alert functionality from this release to simplify the interface. You can continue to send locations and messages to your Moby friends using the Check In functionality. If you’d like more information on why we made this change, please view our blog post here!

To download the new Moby to your phone, click here. For more information, view our website.

And please share any and all feedback with us, either in the comments below or by emailing us at support@mymoby.com, so that we can continue to make Moby better!

A viral video can journey from Youtube, Facebook and Twitter to online newspapers and blogs, move onto the national news and eventually we end up seeing it on the morning newspaper. Now which one of these could we block from our children, even if we were given 3.142 extra hours in the day?!

Over the past few days you have most likely seen the Kony 2012 video pop up on at least one of your social networks. And we can bet a pretty penny that your children have also been exposed to the latest do-good viral sensation.  Now we do not want to argue whether the messaging is right or wrong. But we do want to discuss how parents are reacting to the Kony 2012 when it comes to explaining it to their family:

Jumping On the Band Wagon?

One of the biggest criticisms the Kony 2012 video has received has been that it “over-simplifies” both the problem and its solution. In a digital age, where our attention spans have reduced significantly, it is all too easy to just accept facts “as-is”, often jumping on bandwagons without fully grasping the topic.

In order to balance the need of your teen to do good and engage in changing the world for a better place, we need to ensure that we do not crush their spirits by saying do-go videos may not be 100% accurate with their facts. Instead, we can encourage them to look deeper into the issue themselves. This will not only allow them to execute critical thinking, but it will also steer them away from false facts that have no evidence supporting them.

Kony video itself teaches you how to explain difficult topics

The day will come when little Jr. is going to come up to you and ask for an explanation when it comes to the horrors he has been exposed to on the news. How does a parent explain the massacres to their kids?

As DIYFather pointed out, the Kony 2012 video itself shows us a great way to explain difficult topics to the little ones:

How have you reacted to the Kony 2012 video? Did you need to discuss the topic with your family? We would love to hear your input, so don’t be shy and drop us a comment down below!