Company withdraws apps that locates girls

ISTANBUL

Screen capture from the app website.

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A Russian company has discontinued its smartphone application that helped users find girls following a series of complaints, the BBC has reported.

Although the firm withdrew the “Girls Around Me” app, it took umbrage with the campaign against the service, dismissing claims that its app violated users’ privacy.

"We believe it is unethical to pick a scapegoat to talk about privacy concerns. We see this wave of negative as a serious misunderstanding of the apps' goals, purpose, abilities and restrictions,” it said in a statement to the Wall Street Journal, BBC reported.

“‘Girls Around Me’ does not provide any data that is unavailable to users when he uses his or her social network account, nor does it reveal any data that users did not share with others,” it said.

The application was designed to tap into Foursquare data, then match users’ profiles and photos and finally inform them about the locations of nearby female users. The app was downloaded by more than 70,000 people, Wall Street Journal reported.

Social network Foursquare, which allows users to tag their locations on a map, already announced last week that it would no longer provide any service to the controversial app due to "inappropriate overview of a series of locations."