Pleaserobme.com demonstrates the dangers of location sharing

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February 18th, 2010 - Posted by Kent

We've blogged before about how it's a bad idea to twitter your vacation plans. Well, three computer science students from the Netherlands are taking social networks, and their users, to task for the willy-nilly sharing of location data. The site, pleaserobme.com, is designed to show people just how easy it is for criminals to use realtime location-based data to find empty houses to burglarize.

The site couples Twitter status feeds with 4square activity. 4square is a popular social networking game that lets its users claim rewards for being in real places: bars, restaurants, stores, the homes of friends. One could see it as a web-enabled version of what dogs do when they encounter a fire hydrant. Users simply use a mobile phone application to tell the world where they are and, as the creator of pleaserobme.com points out, where they're not. Namely, at home.

As pleaserobme.com points out, the potential for criminals to find a network of targets is huge. The technology essentially creates a giant cross-reference of addresses:

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…

The site is controversial, of course. Some claim it promotes crime. But according to the Groenvold, the site's creator:

We're not trying to get people robbed, but helping them not to get robbed," said Groeneveld. "We're just presenting this information in a more obvious way. And that's our point: Everyone can see this on Twitter."