PleaseRobMe.com
Here’s a thought on privacy that I think more people should think about: Does the world need to know where you are at all times? Or put differently, do people need to know where you aren’t?
The people behind PleaseRobMe.com don’t think so. While you’re tweeting where you are at you are also sharing that you’re not at home. And hey, you know it is trivial to find someone’s home address these days.
As they say:
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.
Something to think about next time you tweet, foursquare, brightkite or facebook that you’re leaving for a week in Bora Bora, huh? After all, the PleaseRobMe.com people aren’t really doing anything you couldn’t do from a Twitter search page. Kinda scary, really.
Interestingly enough, I stumbled over this site just a couple days ago. A few days previous to that my father – who has never tweeted or used Facebook in his life – gave my wife and I a stern lecture about telling people that we were traveling. More evidence that my father is still one of the wisest men I know.
(That being said, I have no guilt about tweeting when we were stuck on a closed interstate in a blizzard last weekend. In that particular case I definitely wanted people to know where to start the search!)
Possibly Related posts:
- Facebook Privacy
- Facebook for Windows Mobile.
- Facebook Chat Everywhere
- Pownce Shutting Down
- Facebook Privacy Again
Comments
4 Responses to “PleaseRobMe.com”
Leave a Reply
Referrals and Ads
Flair and Sparklies
This to me looks like a tempest in a teapot.
My Twitter profile says I live in Iowa. If they can figure out where I live from that they’re a better sleuth than I am.
My friends and family mostly know when I’m out of town, and in many cases a cursory check of a mail box would tell a bad guy when someone is home or not. If mail>1 then they’re not home. No internets required. Also, if sidewalk not scooped then, nobody in or out recently. If no lights on then nobody home… there’s a LOT of ways to know if a particular house is inhabited or not that don’t require someone to sensationalize sites that say where one IS.
(I’m excepting the ppl who unthinkingly use the GPS services to “check in” at their own homes. That’s just plain stupid. Rule 1 on the internets is don’t say where home IS. That’s not new though.)
This site doesn’t do anything new in my opinion other than ratchet up the scare tactics that seem to be increasing the low level stress that pervades our society. FEAR has been the order of the day since Sept. 11th and honestly, it’s more tiresome than alarming.
So, somebody knows you’re not home? So what? Bad Guys can know you’re not home by knocking on your door. We going to replace doors now with something to keep people away from them?
You’re a smart guy… how many people in your neck of the woods could you identify and find their house from the information on the site? Lots, some, none? Seriously. I’d be interested to hear.
Hey Rich. You might be reading more hysteria into my post than I intended. While I don’t think the PRM.com site is doing anything groundbreaking (and mentioned that people could get the same info with a twitter search) I do think there are a stunning number of people out there who just don’t think when it comes to publicly sharing location data.
You’re not in that category.
Of course there are other and more effective ways to determine if someone is not home. I didn’t mean to imply that this is the easiest or best way.
[...] post prompted by the usually sane Solo-Technology blog and my guess is sometime this week he’ll not be home because he’ll be at work during the day [...]
I know… you’re the one who caught the brunt of my response to the whack jobs out there — I realize you’re a) armed and b) home… I mean, I realize you’re not the hysterical one, but your post was the one that I read when I had time to respond.
What surprises me the most was when I went on their site I saw that there really were people checking into their own homes and THAT is stupid… or at the least careless. The things someone knows about them when they do that is they a) have a GPS enabled phone, possibly even what kind by knowing the twitter client, all clients aren’t for all phones, b) that you have internet access and a computer. That doesn’t mean what it used to mean for defining who fits where on the socio-economic scale. But it does mean /something/.
Didn’t mean to call you an old woman.
I’m on a horse!