Foursquare changes it’s privacy policy.

Foursquare has now started rolling out notifications to it’s users about the changes it’s set to make in it’s privacy policy and it seems that it might have taken some cues from Instagram, and the debacle it caused while changing it’s privacy policies.

The widely used location-based social network has announced that starting January 28,2013, it will start displaying full user names as opposed to the current way of displaying first name and initial of the last name. The company says that it’s making these changes after requests from users who found these abbreviations confusing.

The information which was released by Foursquare in a blog post also says that if the users don’t wish to reveal their real names, they can also change their names using Foursquare’s privacy settings. Other than displaying the full names of users, Foursquare will now share more data with companies about the users who check-in at their businesses, which as of now only shares the data of previous three hours worth of check-ins.

To ensure that the changes in it’s privacy policy don’t irk the users and spark an Instagram-like controversy,  Foursquare has itself told the users about the workarounds they can follow, if they don’t want to reveal their real names or don’t want business to keep a track of their check-ins.

Foursquare has dubbed it’s new privacy policy as “Privacy 101″ , which enables general users to understand every-bit of the new privacy policy in an “easily-readable” way.