The web service that warned about the WRONG burglars
Burglars using the web to rob our houses? Those were the days!
Exactly ten years ago, TechCrunch wrote about a service “making oursquare Super Useful For Burglars”.
The user location services provided by platforms like FourSquare for connecting social networking with actual social activity are great, wrote TechCrunch, but with “a downside we’re all well aware of too: privacy” (and personal safety, I would add).
Back in 2010, someone started a website called “Please Rob Me”. In order to raise awareness about these dangers. As TechCrunch explained, the website would “automatically scan Twitter feeds to find location check-ins that are being tweeted out [and then tweeted them], also pinging the person on Twitter with a message like:
“Hi @NAME, did you know the whole world can see your location through Twitter? #pleaserobme.com”
Alternatively, everybody could get a “Listing of all those empty houses out there”, without even using Twitter, filtering the results by location or user name:
Ah, the good old days…
when we were much less conscious than today that the most dangerous (because unavoidable) “people” who have no business to know where we are are not burglars, but the owners of the platforms offering location services… Don’t you miss those innocent days?
Please Rob Me is gone and its website has been hijacked now. But the tenth anniversary of its arrival is a good day to remind from whom we should really protect our privacy.
Who writes this, why, and how to help
I am Marco Fioretti, tech writer and aspiring polymath doing human-digital research and popularization.
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