"Please rob me" website, reminds people not to post their travel plans etc. on social networking sites.
"PleaseRobMe does a fairly good job of reminding people that when you put that information out there, you don't know who's following you and paying attention to where you are," said Ginger McCall, staff counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "It opens you up to physical attacks."
McCall said she's already seen social media used by people to stalk victims and carry out abuse.
Representatives from Twitter and FourSquare did not return calls for comment.
The dangers are real. In October, police in Los Angeles arrested what was called the Bling Ring, a band of teenagers that broke into the homes of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Orlando Bloom and others, making off with more than a million dollars in loot.
"The group used social-networking sites and celebrity Web sites extensively" to track their victims' whereabouts, said Los Angeles police Detective Brett Goodkin, without elaborating which sites were used.
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.
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.
Links:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2010/02/18/MNMQ1C3A0V.DTL
http://pleaserobme.com/