Over the weekend, a story about an iPhone app captured the attention and ire of the tech world. Girls Around Me is a simple app that takes your location, and then queries Foursquare and Facebook’s location APIs to find any girls (or boys) that are geographically close. You’re then shown a map, powered by Google, with faces (pulled from Facebook profiles) pinned to it. Clicking a face lets you see more information about the person (again pulled from Facebook).

Ostensibly, you’re meant to use Girls About Me to help you decide which bar or nightclub you should visit, but of course the tech world — and even the mainstream media — is instead labeling it as a rapetastic example of the lack of privacy afforded by Facebook’s default settings. You see, Girls Around Me wasn’t hacking Foursquare or Facebook to get this information: It was using open APIs to access information that, by default, Facebook and Foursquare make public. This isn’t a new feature of either social network, of course, but Girls Around Me is just the perfect, creepy illustration of why some information — like your location — should be friends-only by default.

The problem with all of these apoplectic, spittle-drenched reports about Girls Around Me is that they assume the worst. They assume that people will use this app to prey on men and women. They assume that these people are all being hoodwinked by Facebook and Foursquare into sharing their location.

These reports don’t for one minute think that this is just a fun app — an app that most people will run once, laugh heartily (or a little nervously), and then never look at it again. These writers discount beyond all possible doubt that the app will be used for the forces of good, rather than evil. What if a group of guys wants to make sure that the bar they’re going to isn’t a sausage fest, or vice versa? (What’s the female equivalent of a sausage fest, anyway?) What if the girls or boys that share their location data want to be found?

In short, all of these reports are predicated on the assumption that we’re living in a world that is packed with rapists.

I hate to break it to you, but we’re not. The world is also not full of terrorists, or muggers, or people who will steal your children while they play in the yard.

While it’s certainly true that Girls Around Me could make it easier for a predator, and I agree that social networks need to tighten up their default privacy settings, these are merely symptoms of an underlying problem. We live in a culture of fear — and it’s all technology’s fault.

One of my favorite examples is society’s belief that the world we live in today is somehow less safe than X years ago. It’s not. Over time, crime has generally decreased. The worldwide life expectancy is now 67 years — at the turn of the 20th century, it was just 31. In the US, violent crimes are at a 40-year low. Child abductions are dropping. Worldwide, quality of life is increasing not decreasing; in the last 20 years alone, 2 billion more people have gained access to safe drinking water.

Yet here we are, living a life of fear. In just one British study, 13% of respondents thought they would be the victim of violent crime in the next 12 months — and yet the national violent crime rate is just 20 per 1,000, or 2%. Why? Because of technology.

Next page: The internet is our enemy