Fearsquare Shows Crime Stats for Popular Locations

The app takes a person's ten most recent check-in locations from Foursquare and provides aggregated monthly crime data for them from the U.K. police's recent release of street-level crime data, showing people the danger level of their regular haunts.

Fearsquare is created by Lincoln Social Computing Research Centre, which studies technology's effects on society. Fearsquare "represents a unique opportunity to evaluate peoples' perceptions and fear of crime against the real Police statistics," said the group on its blog.

Fearsquare illustrates how mixing personal data generated through a mobile app can add new context to other data. Police reports currently list criminal activity by area, but the location data pulled from Foursquare makes that information much more specific personal.

Fearsquare also lets people check leaderboards to see who lives most dangerously. This service builds on Web pages like PleaseRobMe and Creepy, in addition to Foursquare, which already award online badges to frequent users of their public check-in sites. But Fearsquare's unique curiosity factor may draw even more users who want to see how dare-devilish their friends' lives are.

In the U.S., PadMapper -- an apartment-finding service that maps Craigslist offerings on Google Maps -- also uses an optional crime data overlay for neighborhoods in certain cities.

For example, if one searches for the notoriously seedy Tenderloin area in San Francisco, PadMapper displays a transparent red polygon over certain blocks, warning the would-be apartment hunter of this area's criminal activity.

But PadMapper stops short of listing crimes committed at businesses or venues, as Fearsquare promises to do.