Foursquare is tracking you... responsibly

CEO of Foursquare Jeff Glueck discusses the ethics of companies that track their users’ movements. Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel and Glueck further explore Foursquare's aim to help its customers become less reliant on mapping companies like Google, and how responsibly managing a user’s data and privacy is not only the right thing to do, but good for business. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:28Speaker 01

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• 0:57Nilay Patel?

  Hey everybody, it's Neil I from The Vergecast. This week on the interview episode, we have Jeff Glueck, who's the CEO of Foursquare. Now, you may remember Foursquare 10 years ago, it launched at South by Southwest. It was an app to check into locations with your friends, become the mayor of the airport coffee shop. It's a really different company now. They still run an app called Swarm that lets you check in, but it is a location data services provider. It provides the location services to Snapchat, to Twitter, to everyone that you can think of that needs to know where you are. And right now, that is a really dicey kind of company to run because of all of the privacy conversations we've been having. But Foursquare, I think, is doing it right. And Jeff is a really interesting guy who's really focused on providing the services and

• 1:40Nilay Patel?

  the value that you can get from location while still protecting privacy. And we really got into it about the trade offs between everything technology and phones can do with your location and all of the privacy problems that could cause. It was a great conversation. I love talking to people who are fierce about their values. Check this out, it's Jeff Glueck, CEO of Foursquare.

• 2:01Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're here with Jeff Glueck, the CEO of Foursquare. How are you, sir?

• 2:05Speaker 03

  Hello, great to be here.

• 2:06Nilay Patel?

  Thanks for joining us. So this is like an interesting time to talk to a man who runs a company that does like location services for other big companies and like helps the ad industry go. So I want to talk about that, but let's start with Foursquare. So Foursquare famously started as the check-in app. It was like a hit of like the early sort of Web 2.0.

• 2:24Speaker 03

  10 years ago, South by.

• 2:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And now it's a radically kind of different company. And you've split out Swarm, which is sort of still the check-in product, but your business has turned into something really else. So just walk me through the basics for people who haven't been following the journey.

• 2:38Speaker 03

  So for people who don't know how we've evolved from 2009 and checking in and mares, now the company is really a trusted, independent location platform. And to explain that, if you type the name of the Verge offices into Uber, they're using Foursquare. If you get a geo-filter on Snapchat, that's using our data and technology. If you get tapped on the shoulder because you're traveling in Spain and a friend recommended the Tapas place around the corner on TripAdvisor, that's our technology being used by TripAdvisor. If you tag a tweet on Twitter, that's Foursquare technology at work. And if you get an augmented

• 3:23Speaker 03

  reality layer over your photos and your camera on any Samsung device, that's Foursquare's API and developer tools at work. So we help about 150,000 registered developers understand the context of the real world and connect the digital and the physical world to make user experiences better. And where people go in the real world, which is 90% of the economy still, and I would argue a lot of where we should be spending our time instead of endlessly scrolling screens, is discovering amazing places around us and real people and real friends. So that's what we're about. And so the company's 99% What they call a B2B company. In other words, we provide technology and services to other enterprises and help them get better.

• 4:07Nilay Patel?

  I just want to pull that apart. So I am using Twitter, which is a mistake I make every day, but I'm on it, I'm doing it.

• 4:14Speaker 03

  It's addictive.

• 4:15Nilay Patel?

  I'm working for Jack for free instead of working for Virch for money. And I tag a location. The Twitter app, what says here, here's my GPS coordinates, four score, tell me where I am.

• 4:26Speaker 03

  That's right. So an API is a, is a call, basically. And so the Twitter app will say, here's the Wi-Fi scans I see. And we have a proprietary map of all the Wi-Fi scans in 100 million places and how they interact in the world. GPS, time of day. And we will return back a list to the Twitter user, the saying, you know, maybe you're at Francis Tavern, which is downstairs here, or maybe you're at the Vox office or like, but, but we 80 or 90% of the time, the very first thing we return is right. The users, and users train us. If you're at the Juice Generation and not at the Starbucks, which is only a few feet away, we're constantly learning which is the right answer because billions, over 13 billion times,

• 5:10Speaker 03

  people have said, hey, I'm here, or, or I'm, I'm actually at the, you know, the Gap store next door. And so we're constantly learning the sort of digital fingerprint of 105 million businesses in almost 200 countries. And with this community, it's sort of crowdsourced. And so we make it better and easier to tag a tweet. But we do lots of other things with that technology.

• 5:28Nilay Patel?

  Right, that's the simplest. I think the Snapchat, right? It's like, what are the available filters here? And you're helping them determine where they are.

• 5:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, so they might want to have a filter for, you know, Cooper Cafe in Palo Alto. And recognizing that the phone just took a snap inside Cooper Cafe and not at the wine bar down the street, that, that is when we would trigger or help them understand like, hey, the Cooper Cafe overlay or filter on Snap is, is, now's the time to offer that. And so we just try to make experiences better. You know, we're even getting into better romantic pairings. We've worked with Tinder on their Tinder Places project, which is live in a bunch of countries and cities. It's still in kind of beta, but the basic idea is a user can opt in to be paired with people who love the same places that they love.

• 6:17Speaker 03

  So, you know, maybe, hey, Jennifer, you should meet this person who also lives in Brooklyn and loves the same cold brew coffee spot and goes to the same dog park all the time. You know, you have something in common. And so we found so far with Tinder that that's creating better matches in the sense of people more likely to accept a swipe.

• 6:37Nilay Patel?

  Wow, okay. So there's like three or four things I want to get into. Obviously, I want to talk about being sort of this like mapping company.

• 6:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:44Nilay Patel?

  We talk about that a lot. We spend a lot of time on the Vergecast, to be honest with you, probably too much time talking about competition and antitrust and behemoths. And you're obviously in a market that is pretty concentrated. So there's that. I definitely want to talk to you about privacy, which is something that you have written about. But let me start with something. I think we have a lot of people who listen to our show who want to build companies, who are building companies, who are part of companies that are experiencing change. You just described a huge pivot from what Foursquare was, which was a big consumer company, which was a hit with consumers, to now an infrastructure provider. How did you guys make that pivot?

• 7:18Speaker 03

  So I joined the company almost five years ago, initially as COO. I had been a CMO and a COO and a founder of a company and a CEO of a Palo Alto Mountain View company. And I met Ben Horowitz, from Andreessen Horowitz, who's the biggest investor. And he said, oh, you're thinking of moving back to New York from the Silicon Valley? You should meet Dennis Crowley. That's our, Foursquare's our biggest investment. And they have this really powerful crowdsourced map of the world, and they're trying to figure out, how do we make this a sustainable business? Because the consumer business wasn't growing at the same pace post Instagram or Snap that the early years had. And so when I arrived and I had a conversation with Dennis Crowley, who is our chairman

• 8:00Speaker 03

  and this visionary founder, I'm very passionate. And I remember asking the question, wait, Dennis, you guys have built technology that can recognize when the phone in your pocket or your purse goes in or out of 105 million places in the world, and all we're doing is guiding people to a better burrito? You know, this is big. This is how to connect the digital world and the physical world, how to... Tap people on the shoulder and understand the context, you know, how to distinguish that it's about to rain and you're in your office at 2 P M. Who cares? Or it's going to rain in 10 minutes and you're at Yankee Stadium. You better order an Uber now. And so that kind of context, what kinds of things you like,

• 8:44Speaker 03

  how to personalize technology and how to understand how digital media affects offline behavior. That is a powerful platform. And so the evolution, because we're still a location company. And it's not like Slack where they set out to make a game and they built the internal communication tool that obviously now is going to IPO. We're still a location company. We still, from the beginning, 10 years ago, talked about being the location layer of the Internet. But obviously, we're a B to B company instead of a consumer company primarily, although we still have millions and millions of consumer users of our beloved consumer apps. And so, you know, we started out and I said, just give me a couple of people. I was COO.

• 9:24Speaker 03

  And we're going to go to our 70,000 developers using the tools for free. And we're going to say, above a certain level, the top 1% of you are going to pay. And these were Fortune 500 companies calling our data centers billions of times a year. And we were losing money and we had no revenue. And I remember saying, you know, people will actually pay for something they're using billions of times a year and cost real money to develop and host. And I remember the internal conversation was like, well, but if we charge them, they might not continue using it. Well, what do you got to lose now paying anything? And so we went to all of our top, top developers and we started signing commercial agreements.

• 10:08Speaker 03

  And most of them said, I was wondering when you'd get around to charging us. Of course, we'll pay. We love it. It's the best, you know.

• 10:15Nilay Patel?

  Well, there's another side of that, too, which is if they start paying you, you have to promise them that you'll be around. And at some point, to continue growing for any company, your vendors have to be there for you.

• 10:25Speaker 03

  And, you know, we were spending millions of dollars mapping the world and hosting billions and billions of queries. And so you're right, they want enterprise service level agreements. They want resiliency and they want uptime guarantees and anything that an enterprise software company is going to provide its clients. And so, yes, we needed to be a sustainable business. And so, you know, in the first year, quickly, these B to B services became 70% of the company. And that's when Dennis came to me and said, it was Dennis's idea. I was not expecting it. And he said, you know, we're really, this is going to be our future.

• 11:01Nilay Patel?

  That's a classic sort of Silicon Valley success story, right? We built a consumer app. We got a lot of data. We didn't know what to do with it. We figured out there's a market for this data. Now we're selling the data. You see that all over the place. There's, I think, a louder critique of that, which I have made, which others have made. I just interviewed a woman named Shoshana Zuboff. She wrote a book called The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. She's putting a name on that concept. Do you think the consumers who use your consumer app needed to know that, you know, we're contributing all of this data about where our phones go, about what we are doing here, about these place names even, and that's going to turn into a huge monetized asset for some company that's going to continue to sort of collect data from us? Do you see that shifting? Like, do you think you could have made this kind of big change in what

• 11:43Nilay Patel?

  Foursquare is today? Or did you need kind of that space of no one really knows how this is going to work yet?

• 11:48Speaker 03

  I think we set out to solve a problem, which is, where am I right now?

• 11:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 11:55Speaker 03

  And what is the, what is the nature of the place? Is it a vegan spot? Is it a steak and potato spot? And there was no available tech to do that 10 years ago when Dennis started. So he, he had to build it. He had to build this sort of recognition of 100 million places. So to answer your question, I absolutely believe Foursquare has been thinking about this a long time because we started as a consumer app. And so trust and user participation was essential. And we still believe that data is a privilege. And so everything we do always starts with the question, how is this providing an informed choice to the user? The user's in control. That's the first test. Second, is it adding value for the user? You shouldn't be collecting any information that doesn't relate to the use case you've,

• 12:39Speaker 03

  you're providing that the user has chosen. If a user is opting in because they want to be paired with people who love the favorite spots that they go to better in dating, or because they want to get weather alerts that are contextually smart when you're in a park versus inside a tall building. Or a thousand other use cases we could talk about. The user's in control and you should only be asking for information that is related to the service the user is opting in. And I would point out that for the apps that we power, remember, the vast majority of our understanding of the world and the people moving through it is through our network of developers. You know, we generally see 50 to 70% of people opt in to get these contextual pings when they're near a place to save money or an interesting place.

• 13:22Speaker 03

  And the other folks choose not to, and there is zero information ever collected if you don't choose to opt in. And then you don't get the benefit. You don't get the tap on the shoulder like, hey, you're a TouchTunes user and you know, you love Rihanna and you're at a bar where you can control the music, so you get a ping on your phone and get the party started. This bar Rihanna is the number one artist. So that kind of thing. So the first test is informed consent. We can talk more about that. And the standards are growing for what that is and how plain and clear that language is as opposed to these, you know, long-term privacy policies. Second is limiting information elegantly to just the minimal information you need to provide this special service the user is asking you to provide. And thirdly, users need to remain in control.

• 14:06Speaker 03

  So they need the right to be forgotten globally. We should have that in the US like it does in Europe. We support it in the US and we execute now. We have right to be forgotten, right to portability globally, even though it's not the law here. We just believe in it.

• 14:21Nilay Patel?

  This is on Foursquare's platform.

• 14:22Speaker 03

  This is on Foursquare. And so those are the three core tests, I think. Informed consent, and informed is important. Second is when you're talking about very sensitive thing like location data, that it be limited to providing a useful service. A flashlight app shouldn't be asking you for your location all the time. And then thirdly, you know, users need continued control. I mean, and each of those we could dig into. And I actually advocated for a higher standard that we Call and I've written about this Hippocratic oath and we've been working with tech ethicists to think about how the industry has to evolve and lift its standards. So David Reim-Polger has this concept of the Hippocratic oath for data science. And we advocate that, which is do no harm.

• 15:05Speaker 03

  Are you using information that a user has entrusted you to help that user? Or are you using that information to disadvantage that user or deny access to something in ways that would not be good for the user? And we think every company should be forced to ask that test, kind of like a fiduciary duty for a broker. And so I think those are the four core principles that we try to think about. But look, the industry hasn't been perfect. We've tried to set the highest bar and the standards are evolving. We are in favor of a national privacy standard in the US. And we can talk more about that that should look like because we think that in a world where the best practices of trust are followed, the good players like us will will end up in a good position.

• 15:47Nilay Patel?

  Hang one second, we're going to do an ad, we'll be right back.

• 15:55Speaker 04

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• 16:57Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back with Jeff Glick, CEO of Foursquare.

• 17:01Nilay Patel?

  We could do all day and all night on what the privacy policies should look like.

• 17:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:06Nilay Patel?

  I think we all know at some level, they should just be simpler, right? And you should really know what you're reading. I think the idea that you should be able to push a button and take all your data away and go home.

• 17:14Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 17:14Nilay Patel?

  It's pretty simple.

• 17:15Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 17:15Nilay Patel?

  When you get to the government should mandate these things, I think it's a lot trickier. So how do you see that regulation shaking out? Because that move is coming, right? I mean, I talked to politicians, I talked to regulators, I talked to other CEOs. They're a little bit less happy about it than you are, maybe, but everyone sees the momentum.

• 17:32Speaker 03

  It needs to happen.

• 17:33Nilay Patel?

  What do you think it should look like?

• 17:34Speaker 03

  I've talked about those four principles just now that I think should be embedded.

• 17:39Nilay Patel?

  But how would you codify it? I think that's the question. It's very easy for you and me to sit here and say, I should be able to put the button, delete my data from Foursquare and walk away. It is much harder to write a law that compels Google to build that product.

• 17:51Speaker 03

  Well, look, GDPR in Europe is something that people have adapted to now. It's not necessarily clear all the time what exactly, how exactly the GDPR regulations will break out, because the French are interpreting it a little different, maybe, than than other countries, and it's early. My analogy is to self-driving cars.

• 18:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 18:09Speaker 03

  So, human beings are actually pretty bad at driving, and over a million people are killed, and tens of millions are badly injured every year, because human beings are bad at driving. We go nuts, rightly, when one person is killed by a self-driving car, because the norms are being built, and we need to have the right legal frameworks and the right ethical standards for this. But I think if you just throw out self-driving cars at the first mistake, you are actually condemning the human race to millions and millions of people being killed and maimed every year. How do we not throw out the baby with the bathwater? How do you establish norms for what self-driving software should to decide to do when it has to choose between two accidents that are going to happen and things like that? We have to create those standards. Same thing with location.

• 18:54Speaker 03

  We believe context is really important to making AI and AR work and location-based services. I mean, remember, I remember, you know, learning to drive at age 16, and there wasn't Google Maps, and if you made a wrong turn... You're in big trouble. Like, you had to pull over and get out a paper map and flip 15 pages, right? Now, we take it for granted that location-based services will just reroute you, right? And by the way, avoid the traffic. So I think, you know, for urban, urban planning and logistics and personalization of content, all these things, this is good stuff, but it needs to follow these legal principles. And now, the California law, we're actually big supporters of, the one danger of writing the legislation poorly is not just stifling

• 19:37Speaker 03

  good innovation with the bad, but it's also the thing you alluded to earlier. We see ourselves as an independent platform for 150,000 other companies to invent the future. Very much, our customers come to us because they don't want to be dependent on the big walled gardens. They don't want to depend on Uber and Samsung don't want to be 100% beholden to Google Maps to build their future. And, and all of our customers like that, Twitter and Tencent and Alibaba and all of them. And, and so there's a danger, if you write the legislation badly, that the only companies that survive are actually these giant oligopoly companies that have armies of lawyers.

• 20:14Nilay Patel?

  I mean, this is the critique of GDPR, right? The compliance costs are too high. Only the companies can pay them. They're going to be very happy about the law because they know it's going to reduce competition and it'll take over.

• 20:23Speaker 03

  I saw this in the, I started as, working for a guy named Michael Porter, who wrote Competitive Advantage. And we saw this in the gas station industry. I know this is a funny analogy for your listeners, but what happened is at first, like, when pollution control technology came out and, you know, in, in most states now, you have to have those things that suction up the gas fumes when you're filling up your car. Well, that's really expensive technology for a service station to install. I mean, it's like a million dollars a service station or more. And the big companies, the Exons, and at first, we're like, don't regulate us. This is ridiculous. And then they realized, hey, we can afford this. We're the richest company in the world. All those independent gas sellers who undercut us in price, they're going to go out of business, which is exactly what happened. So then the big companies realize, oh, I like this regulation.

• 21:07Speaker 03

  It's going to stifle competition. And that, I think, is a little bit on the minds of these of Google and Facebook. They realize that if the legislation is shaped in such a way that it puts all their competitors out of business, that they'll end up in a good place. And so it's just going to be a real, real awful tax, and it's going to put a lot of startups out of business, even though they may be right, they just can't afford the legal costs. And so that is a real danger, because Google and Facebook have armies of lawyers, and they'll be fine. So I think it's really important that we think about the competitive dynamic as we write this legislation, and that it gets what consumers want, but it isn't overly burdensome. And you don't want to have to click 800 times

• 21:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:45Speaker 03

  just to opt into a service, right? It should be super transparent, it should be a few sentences upfront, not in a 200-page privacy policy. What are you signing up for? And what are you going to get? And how might the information be shared?

• 21:56Nilay Patel?

  You brought up the flashlight app.

• 21:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:58Nilay Patel?

  And I think that one's pretty clear, right? Like, the flashlight's app, like, I need to know where you are. You should probably say no. Why?

• 22:05Speaker 03

  Right.

• 22:05Nilay Patel?

  But weather apps are massive, sort of, problem in the industry. There are lots of weather apps that take your location, because they need to tell you what the weather is, and then they just sell it on the back end, all over the place. How do you stop that from happening? How do you stop? How do you tell the consumer, actually, this thing is going to keep a real-time record of your location? How do you stop Verizon from using a third-party data broker who then is going to happily sell your location? Like, there was that great motherboard report.

• 22:32Speaker 03

  So I think that the lawsuit in the weather company case in LA, if you really dig into it, it's that the disclosure in Europe on the weather company app is very clear, like, you're going to get alerts. And these aren't just a storm is coming to where you are, that's also, it can be things like pollen alerts where you are, and it can be pollution alerts where you are, and lots more things that actually are really valuable, and they need to be dynamic to the neighborhood level and your specific location. And there's value to the user. So, but in Europe, it's very clear, you're sharing location, and it will be used under our privacy policy to create personalized ads across the internet and share with partners. And you can read our privacy policy for all the protections we put in place.

• 23:15Speaker 03

  And then in America, it's just read our privacy policy like here. And that is where the industry needs to get better. And we've been upgrading and advising all of our apps to sort of put very plain language upfront. But I actually think it's legit, if you were providing a location-based service, to learn about that, hey, this is a fast food frequenter and this other device is shopping for a car right now. And this other device is a fitness junkie and is always at parks and proffits and or yoga studios and things. So I think it's legit to have an industry that brings more personalized content and offers and ads. And we can discuss that. I actually think it's good for the consumer.

• 23:55Speaker 03

  But it has to be regulated. It has to have standards and the user has to know what they're doing and getting in control. The motherboard article is a totally different thing.

• 24:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I just want to, it's for the listener who isn't familiar. Motherboard had a great piece where they basically, the author paid, I don't know, like a bail bondsman, some money to track a phone number and return a real-time map of his location that had been sourced through a network of shady third parties directly from Verizon.

• 24:20Speaker 03

  So not all location tech or companies are created equal. We don't do anything like that.

• 24:25Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah. But how do you write a law that stops that?

• 24:27Speaker 03

  Well, that's actually pretty easy. I don't think that regulated common carriers, basically. And basically, it's a basic fact of life that your phone needs to be connected to the network. And so, and so really, without a special opt-in, just because your phone was on the network, they were collecting very coarse cell tower triangulation location data. It's actually not that good data, but that's aside the point. It's, it's rough location. And by the way, that's stored, you know, the NSA is collecting all, you know, metadata on all your calls and, and the government privacy is topic is just as big as what Facebook is collecting, I think. And we need to talk about that too, and net neutrality and stuff like that.

• 25:11Speaker 03

  But, but you can just say, you cannot sell. A phone number's real time location, certainly not to a shady network of resale. I mean, we just don't do anything like that. We never would.

• 25:24Nilay Patel?

  And there's no consumer value.

• 25:26Speaker 03

  And there's no consumer value or opt in just because your phone's connected to the network. Just because you turned on your phone, you consent it. But that's not how consent should work. Like I said, when we do consent, it's like, hey, do you want to participate in Tinder Places? And, you know, 50 or 60 people say, yeah, I'd love to be paired with people who are like me and go to the same spots because where you go says a lot about who you are. And, you know, 40, 50% say, no, I don't want to participate. The user's really in control because when, you know, it's 50, 60, 70% choosing yes and 30, 40% choosing no, the user's making an informed choice, I would argue. It's the stuff that's just like buried on page 400 of the Apple Terms of Service that when you turn on your phone, that's not opt in. That's not consumer control. And so the telcos just shouldn't

• 26:10Speaker 03

  be in that business. And you just, I mean, the telco regulations are thousands of pages. It's very easy.

• 26:15Nilay Patel?

  They can't. They can't help themselves. They don't want to be in that business. But you collect a lot of data. So do you ever think you're working at cross incentives? Like, are you working against your own self-interest economically to not sell some of this stuff?

• 26:27Speaker 03

  I have turned down time and again, million dollar offers to sell data that was against our sense of ethics. And I turned it down in a millisecond. And people have offered millions of dollars and, you know, nothing is worth violating the trust because this is a business that depends on trust. And I mean, my, it's not that, that people don't approach us. It's just that we say no. One of the things in the New York Times article, which we didn't really dig into about location, is that in theory, if you have a consistent identifier and you, that consistent identifier over specific timestamps goes to lots of

• 27:08Speaker 03

  different places, you could in theory re-identify that anonymized individual because you know where they work and they live and they were at a certain place. It's actually hard to do at scale. The article made it sound easy. It's actually really hard because you live in an apartment building and you go to this. Hundred-story building and good luck deciphering who's who. But we think a lot about that. And so when we worked with institutional investors who wanted to understand, is Chipotle affected by the E. coli standard? And so we blurred the data sets so that you could never connect a person across visits. We might say, this month, there were so many visits at a Chipotle and last month, there were so many visits. But you can't see the trails of individuals. So you can't reidentify the data.

• 27:53Speaker 03

  That would be an example of putting a lot of thought into how to ensure privacy. Because what those stock pickers want, they don't care about Zach's trail. They want to know, are more people going to McDonald's after they announced all-day breakfast than the week before?

• 28:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 28:11Speaker 03

  And so that's the kind of, and that's, I think, a legitimate market research question. And we can help. But we do it in such a way that you can't get the identities. And we've been asked for that and we just don't participate in that because we just think there's too much upside to risk this. We're playing for the next 20 years and there's so much opportunity here in ways that can be totally privacy-friendly and user-controlled that we're not going to risk that for someone offering us a million dollars for raw location data. We just won't participate in that. The real danger is that all this innovation that we believe in and contextual awareness, what we call contextual computing, that could all be risked if some creepy company

• 28:52Speaker 03

  does creepy things and we get really bad legislation instead of smart legislation. And so that's not worth it. And we'd love to see unethical behavior weeded out of the market because I think that's what the consumers will need to believe in this future. And so, no, it's not worth it. I've never had a board member push us to violate our ethics principles. And by the way, employees at all of these companies are a great check because employees are, I mean, I'm a dad of three kids and I care about what kind of world we're building for my kids. And our employees, look at what, the backlash that Google experienced when they started building the Chinese censored search engine.

• 29:33Speaker 03

  I mean, employees are vocal advocates because they want to, these are talented people and they want to be working on stuff they feel good about. So that's another real check, I think, at top-tier companies is that the employees, and I think- You know, are joining companies that have a real sense of values and principles and a mission, they are the first line of defense in a lot of this stuff.

• 29:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think the problem is there are lots of companies that are quite a bit shadier. I think that's the real, the real thing that needs, the regulation needs to address.

• 30:05Speaker 03

  I, I couldn't agree more.

• 30:07Nilay Patel?

  So I want to talk about competition because you brought up that oath again, and I want to end with like what Foursquare is doing.

• 30:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:12Nilay Patel?

  You run a company, you're articulating some very clear values here. You're in a big messy market. There are big telcos that maybe have fewer values or less well-articulated values. There is a Google in this world that

• 30:26Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 30:27Nilay Patel?

  Runs a mapping business. There's an Apple in this world that runs a mapping business. How does Foursquare continue to compete as an independent with values that keep you from making all of the money that you could potentially make? Like, what is that ramp for you continue to look like?

• 30:41Speaker 03

  Well, I think there's room for a scaled independent location platform that is serving the independent innovators of the world. You know, our customers, whether it's Garmin or Apple as a customer, or Twitter, Uber, or Microsoft, Snapchat, or Line, or, you know, companies around the world that don't want to be beholden in their innovation futures, as well as, you know, kids in a dorm room in Amsterdam who want to start up a company. Those are our customers and we're devoted to this independent community and we think that an alternative to Google Maps should exist for the future of innovation because otherwise you wake up, you know, companies that have, if you're HTC and you signed up for Android and all of a sudden you're fully commoditized and you're out of business because

• 31:25Speaker 03

  you signed up for the Google

• 31:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 31:27Speaker 03

  worldview and the terms keep changing and, you know, it's, it's a Google world you live in. And that's why Uber wanted to start migrating off Google Maps and they came to us and we're helping them do that. And so, you know, there is value in that independent and we have found a sizable business. We're nothing like the size of Google and we're not yet profitable, but we're growing fast and we're going to get profitable at this rate. And, and, but it takes a lot of R and D to build a map of the world and keep it fresh so that the Ubers and the Samsungs and the Twitters rely on us nightly and Apple and others. And so, you know, it takes a lot of investment and so I think there's a room for an independent player, there's demand for it, we're seeing that. But that's how we compete because our clients don't want to be at the, sort of beholden

• 32:11Speaker 03

  to Facebook and Google forever.

• 32:13Nilay Patel?

  Do you think that you'll ever build another, like a straight consumer map app?

• 32:18Speaker 03

  So we have innovated a bunch with Swarm, which is a wonderful way to log all your travels through the world for yourself. It's really for yourself. And City Guide has great recommendations globally, especially when you travel outside the United States, because we're truly global, and Yelp is very good in the US, but they're not as global at all. And so we have a kind of small labs, skunkworks, that Dennis Crowley, our founder, leads. And we're always, there's good stuff coming over the next year. You're going to see kind of experiments about the next generation of things in augmented reality and gaming that are intelligent to where you're standing. And the game might change based on walking into a pizza place versus walking into a

• 33:02Speaker 03

  gym and things like that. So Dennis is very interested in that, so you're going to see us continue to innovate and experiment, and we'll look for beta testers. But I think more likely than our future is invent the next Snapchat or Instagram. It's much more likely that we'll invent new kind of user interface paradigms that are useful and then encourage our 150,000 app developers to implement some of them in their scaled communities.

• 33:28Nilay Patel?

  Do you think you have the ability to export those values out to those developers? I mean, that's the thing that you have a little bit of leverage now. You can say, hey, we're not going to let you do this kind of tracking. Hey, we're not going to let you resell this kind of data. Is that something that you enforce?

• 33:40Speaker 03

  Yes. We have a bunch of privacy rules that are just built into the system. We have an ethics committee and ethics training. And so we think a lot about this, and I can give some examples. So for instance, we sign the never again tech pledge, which is we don't think digital data should be ever used to create a compilation or registry of religious belief in the United States or anywhere. Like, a Muslim registry was a hot topic at that time. And so we just ban, we just block all that sensitive information, things like LGBT locations, things like sensitive medical locations. We just don't let our developers see that. It's sort of hardcoded into the system. Now, we see it, but by policy, we just don't think that should be out in the world.

• 34:26Speaker 03

  And so that's, we could talk for another hour about all the privacy safeguards and things, but, and look, we're continually trying to get better. We audit our partners, but I would like to see all of our partners do a better job at onboarding screen disclosures. I think that's going to be a real place for both regulatory and self-governing push, because I think consumers should be in control and data is a privilege and the industry has to get better there.

• 34:49Nilay Patel?

  Last question. When the Vergecast listeners listening to this, how should they think of Foursquare? And two, what comes next in this big conversation about location and privacy and data?

• 34:59Speaker 03

  I hope they now know that Foursquare really is this platform. So it's the most trusted, independent platform for understanding how people move through the real world. That's what's been blazoned on the wall in our offices and that's what gets us up in the morning. And, you know, you will see us trying to spend time with policymakers and explain the benefits of location and also our belief that privacy standards, the US needs them and there should be a law. And it should be a smart one that ensures competition and innovation, but also protects users so they can trust their apps, their favorite apps. And so we want to be

• 35:40Speaker 03

  part of that conversation. We want to elevate that conversation and we're happy to dig into the details, but that will maybe be the next podcast.

• 35:48Nilay Patel?

  Probably. Well, I'm always happy to talk to companies and CEOs that express their values. So thank you very much for coming by.

• 35:54Speaker 03

  Thank you for inviting us.

• 35:56Nilay Patel?

  That was Jeff Glueck, the CEO of Foursquare. I suspect we'll have him back on as the sort of privacy regulation conversation heats up. We'll be back later this week with another regular Vergecast and we're here every Tuesday with an interview episode and sometimes some emergency episodes as well. Let me know what you think. I'm at Reckless. Would love to hear from you. We'll talk to you soon.

• 36:48Speaker 06

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