Hey, do you have a Twitter account? Have you ever noticed those messages in which people tell you where they are? Pretty annoying, eh. Well, they’re actually also potentially pretty dangerous. I’m about to tell you why.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the whole location-aware thing. The information is very interesting and can be used to create some pretty awesome applications. However, the way in which people are stimulated to participate in sharing this information, is less awesome. Services like Foresquare allow you to fulfill some primeval urge to colonize the planet. A part of that is letting everyone know you own that specific spot. You get to tell where you are and if you’re there first, it’s yours. O, and of course there’s badges..
Foursquare
The danger is publicly telling people where you are. This is because it leaves one place you’re definitely not… home. So here we are; on one end we’re leaving lights on when we’re going on a holiday, and on the other we’re telling everybody on the internet we’re not home. It gets even worse if you have “friends” who want to colonize your house. That means they have to enter your address, to tell everyone where they are. Your address.. on the internet.. Now you know what to do when people reach for their phone as soon as they enter your home. That’s right, slap them across the face.
To raise some awareness on this issue and emphasize how easy it is to retrieve this information let me introduce: http://www.pleaserobme.com. Have fun and please don’t hook up Foursquare to your Twitter account, okay?
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Waardige waarschuwing. (Al is de eerste reactie toch, haha, pwnd! Gevolgt door een gevoel van opluchting als ik besef dat ik nog juist niet _zo_ dom ben.)
Awesome idea and great execution.
Well done, and proud of telling my American colleagues here that this site was build by Dutchies, my fellow countrymen.
DG
I posted my response to this on techcrunch but I wanted to make a special effort to make sure you guys got it. I vote a huge kudos on this project. Wonderfully executed and really ought to nail home some privacy loop holes people are leaping through on a daily basis.
I don’t understand how everyone continues to go to the “how would they know the house was empty” or “I live alone” points.
If I am going to rob someone, do I want to rob a place during the day (when most robberies do occur) knowing there could be any number of people there or when I know there is one less?
It would be insanity easy to create a script that would find every fool on a social network that uses phrases including ‘home’ (insert additional logic here) and shows the geo-address of that post, scrape it and then monitor it. Maybe even find other people with geo-addresses near by. Then a tiny bit of human effort to connect dots and some email alerts and I would know when the best time to target a location would be. Even learn trends about when people usually get back.
It’s terrifying how easy it would be (especially now that I've thought it out) I'm half tempted to do it to alert users - but really would they listen and understand how dangerous it is? Well done gentlemen! Well done.
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enjoyed this blog!