Saturday, September 4, 2010

The Location Craze - a Burglar's Dream

Be careful when disclosing your location on social media sites ~ it may be nice to discuss where you are ~ but it tells burglars where you're not: at home.

PleaseRobMe.com was developed for this reason, to point out the danger of publicly broadcasting your movements. They launched their site in February 2010, but have since taken it down, saying their point had been made. Their web page has several blog posts listed which discuss this issue of "over-sharing."

Posting photos can give away your location, too.

ICanStalkU.com is another site meant to raise awareness about inadvertent information sharing.

You may not realize it, but if you are posting photos taken from a smart phone, you may be giving away your location due to geotagging. If you'd like to know more about geotagging, and how to disable it on your smart phone, check out these directions.

ICanStalkU.com makes its point by asking, "What are people really saying in their tweets?" and posting the location where the tweeter's smart phone took the photo and even providing a map -- information they were able to glean from the smart phone photo. If they can do it, so can the bad guys.
Ever since the launch of Foursquare and its subsequent popularity, Facebook and Twitter begain letting people include a location as part of their tweets.
Read the post on Mashable about the popularity of Foursquare, a location-based social network.

This reminds me of how some burglars have chosen their victims the old-fashioned way -- by reading the obituaries and the wedding announcements in the newspaper.


2 comments:

  1. I guess as we as a society advance with technology, burglars are having to advance as well. Like you mentioned criminals use to read the newspaper for obits and events, now everything seems to be on the web. Great reminds we need to take to heart.

    Mason
    Thoughts in Progress

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  2. You can bet the criminals keep in step with technology and use it to their advantage.
    ID theft has been around for years; it was one of the most common crimes we'd profile in Crime Stoppers ~ we'd have surveillance photos of the criminal using a stolen card. The ironic thing was when the economy took a downturn, the criminals were using the cards to buy gas and clothing rather than the usual electronic devices.

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