Have you been eying that pretty blond you see on the train every morning on your way to work? Have you ever waited for the subway for over an hour on a Saturday night, drunk, really wishing you had an extra five bucks in your wallet so you could hop into a cab? Or simply, have you wanted to know the road conditions of your morning commute?

As with everything else in life these, now there’s an app for that.

Bumped.in, Fare/Share, and Waze are part of a slew of social networks for daily commuters that have cropped up recently, hoping to make your travel time more enjoyable. So for users who wish to log in, they’ll probably be someone else on the other end, willing to chat with you on the train, share a cab, or give you road updates — all based on your phone’s GPS system.

But with so much information out there, there’s the obvious question — how do you know that all the stalkers aren’t going to come out of the woodwork? How safe is your data?

“For one, you can’t use a fake email address and have to have a valid phone number to log in, said Jeff Novich, who started a Fare/Share, a cab sharing app in NY last week. “But more importantly, the only information the other user is going to get is your gender, age and first name. Outside of our services, there’s no way for anyone to contact you.”

Besides, it’s probably far easier for someone to follow you home on the train then find out all the apps that are downloaded on your phone and coordinate a cab share with you. And, you have to agree to someone else looking at your data, anyway.

Most of these apps also seem to have a fairly rigorous rating system, so you can actually complain about that slightly sketchy dude who was in your cab last night.

Apps like FourSquare, where you can log in your location on a minute-by-minute basis, probably make stalking far easier. Though there hasn’t been any reported increase in nefarious activities from what we can tell.

But honestly stalking is the least of your worries.

“While cyberstalking is one way in which commuter data could be misused, there are many potential legal ramifications”, said Rebecca Jeschke, media relations director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, perhaps the Web’s most staunch defender of user privacy.

“When does this available become available in a lawsuit? In a custody case? a divorce case? If this information is collected, there is always a chance that someone will get access to it…Start thinking worst case scenario.

Eric Goldman is an associate professor at Santa Clara University Law School and the director of the High Tech Law Institute. He said that location information can be damning depending on what it yields. “It can place a person at a specific location at a specific time,” said Goldman.

“The main risk is unexpected consequences of this data,” Goldman said. “Being at point A at a certain time, by definition, means the person isn’t at point B, which can destroy alibis, i.e., “I was at the office” when I was really with an undisclosed paramour or playing hooky.

“Location information can have competitive value, such as tipping off that a person is visiting an undisclosed key vendor or talking with a potential merger partner,” Goldman said.

Concerns about the well-being of a person’s family can also be triggered by the use of location-based apps. A group of Dutch provocateurs created ‘Please Rob Me,’ an add-on to the popular location app Foursquare, ‘For All Those Empty Homes Out There,’ according to their site. The intent of Please Rob Me was to use humor to educate people about what can happen when they broadcast their location. According to the site’s mission statement, “The danger is publicly telling people where you are. This is because it leaves one place you’re definitely not… home.”

However, Goldman said that ultimately it is up to the users to safeguard their own privacy, and if something were to happen, the site would not be liable.

“If people consent to publish their location information through the apps, then the terms of the consent govern,” said Goldman. “So long as the app honors the user’s consent, there aren’t really other privacy laws that apply. If the information is published with the user’s consent, then the intermediate publishers (i.e., the app providers) are not liable due to a special immunity Congress passed in 1996. See, e.g., the 5th Circuit’s opinion in Doe v. MySpace.


“However, if the location information is disclosed in contravention to the user’s consent, then a number of laws apply and the app provider could have a legal problem.”

And that’s a big “if.”

For all the users playing around with their iPhones, few seem to be worried about the potential consequences.

“Very few concerns have been raised by users,” said Dian Eisnor, VP Community Geographer of Waze, a mobile social application that allows users to build and track real-time intelligence for road conditions.

Waze recently crossed the 1 million-user mark, and in July it began to pump information through Facebook and Twitter to enhance its real-time traffic navigation and road conditions.

“We are much more rigorous and want to educate people on understanding what/when they’re sharing,” Eisnor said in an email.

Eisnor also detailed the measures which the company has undertaken to ensure privacy, such as storing data from different geographically-located user groups on different servers, anonymizing the start- and endpoints of trips and coding trips and users so that the information cannot be traced back to a specific person or location.

In spite of the privacy controls, Eisnor said that Waze users are sharing their trip information, location data and other information because they want to and they see the value in it.

“Our users are sharing because they are helping build something,” Eisnor said. It’s intentional.”

Of course, other commuter apps are out there for people who are hoping to strike up a conversation.

Bumped.in, which launched recently to help commuters connect with each other, especially when an icebreaker is needed on a long bus or train trip.

Users have in-depth control over what information they share, and before they agree to an in-person meeting, they must confirm it, said Kiran Savalia of the Bumped.in, team.

While it hardly sounds like ironclad data security, people who aren’t interesting in finally meeting that beautiful stranger on the train can take their pick of hundreds of other location-sharing apps that suit their comfort level.

“Certainly it’s always nice to find new ways to meet people.” Jeschke said that in the days before cell phones, texting and different digital communications platforms, people who mustered the courage used to write a notes and drop it on the lap of their fellow commuters. Something along the lines of ‘I think you’re cute, call me.’

“I had a friend who that happened to,” said Jeschke. “He showed the note to his wife and she accused him of forging it.”