A lot of people are already pretty leery about sharing their locations online using location-based apps like Foursquare, Gowalla and Facebook Places. Fearsquare is an interesting service that cross-references your check-ins with a police database to show how many crimes per month are committed in any particular location. Creepy and informative!

When you link up your Foursquare account to Fearsquare, it examines your 10 most recent check-ins and rewards “FearPoints” to you based upon how many violent crimes, robberies and antisocial crimes were committed in the area. The FearPoints go towards your overall score, which can bump you up higher on the Fearsquare leaderboard. The leaderboard keeps track of the most dangerous locations users have checked-in to and the “most dangerous users” who have accumulated the most points.

Unfortunately, Fearsquare only checks for locations within the U.K., which makes me sad, because I move through some pretty awful areas. The website also offers a survey to help determine whether people view their check-in locations differently after seeing the crime statistics associated with them. Fearsquare was developed by the Lincoln Social Computing Research Centre, which studies how individuals and society interact with technology.

I would love to see something like this pop up in the U.S., since the entire Scribbal team uses Foursquare like mad and we would love to see what our FearPoint status would be. For now, we’ll just have to live without it. In the end, Fearsquare worked on me because now I know where I don’t want to go next time I visit the U.K.

What do you think? Would crime statistics change what locations you visit and check-in to?