Foursquare rolled out new privacy features today to make checking in to homes safer for the homeowner.

A few months ago, Foursquare changed venues that were categorized as homes to only appear in the 'nearby places' list if you were friends with the venue creator, in addition to other privacy features.

Now, only the person who created the 'home' and their friends can see the address on the venue page. On the venue page, only the creator and their friends can see the pin on the map, while everyone else can only see the general location of the home.

Foursquare also added a "Report a problem" link to make it easier for users to report that a venue is their home (see screen shot below) and re-categorized multiple venues in its database.

"For instance, we'd re-categorize if only one person had ever checked in there and it was near a lot of other homes..." the company blog states.

Users on the Foursquare blog are posting positive reviews:

"A lot of people get concerned when I check into home on foursquare," Molly G writes. "My husband and I compete for mayor almost weekly, so it makes it a lot of fun. We worried about security issues, so our complete address was never added on the venue. Thank you, foursquare, for tweaking these features though!!!"

Another user, Nann Flowers, writes, "Sounds like some thoughtful and positive changes. Keep it up! Why is this silly game so addictive?"

New York-based Foursquare was founded in 2009 by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai. It has raised $71.4M to date from investors including Union Square Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and Kevin Rose.

SCREEN SHOT

The "Report a problem" link lets users remove their home from Foursquare, report a miscategorization and more.

CONTACTS & LINKS

Dennis Crowley, Co-founder
Twitter: @dens
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/dpstyles
Google+: https://plus.google.com/118264184129842070900/posts

Naveen Selvadurai, Co-founder
Twitter: @naveen
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/naveen
Google+: https://plus.google.com/106598937686865040124/posts

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