Please Rob Me – Location Based Social Networking Burglary

| Feb 26, 2010 | 3 comments

I used Foursquare less than 20 times before the kind folks at forthehack who created Please Rob Me helped me see the potential danger of not only stalkers (you know who you are) but the new breed of tech savvy burglar who are using Location-based social networking. Please Rob Me, listing all those empty homes out there

Social sites like Localtweeps make it easy for thieves to find Twitter users to size up based on zip code.

Yep, that’s right. While you are busy checking in at home, work, the grocery, your favorite restaurant . . . even your child’s school. . . (What the HELL are you thinking?!) There are people just waiting for your next move . . . plotting your habits and sizing you and your home up.

There are ways to responsibly use Location-based social networking, but checking into every single place you visit on a daily basis . . . especially your home – is not it.

Word to the wise : for those of you who have friends who use these services – make sure you tell them before their next visit that you will bitch slap them if they check in at your house.

From the why page from the Please Rob Me website the Forthehack folks state that “The goal of this website is to raise some awareness on this issue and have people think about how they use services like Foursquare, Brightkite, Google Buzz etc. Because all this site is, is a dressed up Twitter search page. Everybody can get this information.”

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Danielle Hatfield

About the Author

Danielle Hatfield is Chief Dirt Digger at Experience Farm, Managing Partner of Linking Greensboro, That chick who is responsible for hatching @gsotweetup, Admin for Social Media Club Piedmont and Art Coordinator for StudioB. When she is not tweeting about coffee drinking and bacon consumption, her passion is Web Development, Brand Strategy, Email Marketing, Graphic Design, Social Media, Recycled Furniture Design, Vintage Style, Travel, Art, Social Networking Events, . . . oh, and she speaks her mind.
  • http://intensedebate.com/people/mobloso Travis Wright

    This has been a very popular topic lately. It was all over twitter. I had the epiphany a few months ago, which is why I never use them… glad other people are becoming more aware.

    Thanks for the article!

  • http://intensedebate.com/people/ZenInsight ZenInsight

    This is scary. I will remember this article.

  • Ziv

    The real solution is not to be conscious of what you share, but to have real controls in place over who get to see your location.

    If we want to make location based services successful, we can't expect users to stop and think "is that a sensitive location that I am tweeting about?" or "what are the implications of posting this status update on 4square?" every time they post a status update. That will just kill these services.

    What people really need is a way to define exactly when, where and with who they want to share their info. They don't want to share their location with the world – they want to share their location with their friends, so why not allow users to create some meaningful privacy rules?

    Locaccino for example, is a location-based social network ( apps.facebook.com/Locaccino) which gives users the ability to better express their privacy preferences, using a privacy platform from Zipano Technologies (http://www.zipno.com). As a result, our data shows that users of this app share twice as much.