Air Force Flies Red Flag Over GeoSocial

WARNING: “…careless use of [geosocial] services by airmen can have devastating operations security and privacy implications,” stated someone at the Air Force according to the Associated Press. (I presume that means airwomen as well.)

This is the latest red flag thrown by the U.S. military – this time the U.S. Air Force – in an ongoing battle between freedom to engage in virtually social apps and perceived security violations resulting from that activity.

The Force, like the Marines before them, believe tools such as Facebook Places and Foursquare could reveal explicit locales of troops not just to their buddies but to the less friendly dudes of Al-Qaeda.

Because of the manual requirements of many of these services I think this is largely a human engineering issue and not a technology threat. Frankly if the U.S. military gave it some consideration they might find that exploiting the services could help in the U.S. efforts. Not that I would know anything about that…

This post originally appeared on Locl.ly.