Great, you just gave 1000′s of bad people the idea to rob people this way!

Those bad people probably already figured it out…

Absolutely agreed. I’ve been saying this all along – it’s too easy to trace your real address with Twitter alone, but with Four Square it’s almost too easy.

Ask yourself: would you post a note with your whereabouts on your door every time you leave the house for a while?

If Foursquare told you where my house is then it might be a problem. If my cell phone told you where I am at any given time and you could see my history, then we really have a problem. But someone who uses Foursquare once in a while? Do they really have a problem here? I don’t think so.

Many people don’t live alone–how could would-be burglars know that a house is empty based solely on the location of one of potentially several members of a household? This would only work if the burglar personally knew his victim (and that she lived alone), and in that case, he wouldn’t be a burglar, he’d be a stalker.

Wow, i’ve heard of mashups, but wow, this takes the cake. This definitely highlights the negative aspects of a lot of the new geo location technology.

I guess the lesson to be learned and spread is “caveat tweet-or” (or foursquare-or)
-Tim

So, robbers assume that, because I’m checking in on Foursquare, that I’m single and have no dogs at home?

If someone wants to rob me, they’re going to ring my doorbell.

So do you guys just never leave your house? If you’re that terrified of burglary get an alarm system.

Here’s a tip, Burglars: Most houses are empty during the day.

Lets see–President posted saying he’s at Area 51!

Quickly, put a whoopee cushin on his chair!!

Finally, technology that’s useful.

“hey burglars! 9-5 I’m in my office, not home.”

equivalently earth-shattering information will be thus revealed by foursquare.

Oh noes. You’d better leave your lights on 24/7 too, so potential burglars think you’re always at home.

Narcissistic cowards amuse me. It’s a shame they also seem to be running the US government and media.

Pretty funny!

Add Blippy feeds to the site and your burglar has a handy dandy shopping list!

You just have to be smart about it. That’s all there is to it. It’s a crazy world out there.

This is why I leave a few angry machete wielding Samoans at home when I’m out checking in at restaurants with Foursquare.

Finally. A monetization model!

Precisely. And being targeted is absolutely a legitimate fear for women and people in the public eye. Burglary ranks pretty low on the list of dangers, though.

And Foursquare is neat because you can simply choose to show your location only to friends. I’m pretty sure that’s the default.

Exactly

[...] via Please Rob Me Makes Foursquare Super Useful For Burglars. [...]

So you’re promoting security through obscurity? Like, never, ever mentioning the doors at your house are left unlocked, hoping no-one will find out? And blame the people who point out the problem?

You should try to get a job at Microsoft, they’ve been living by this principle for decades…

As far as privacy and location are concerned: People are always looking at specific services and saying: “Hey, why not leave a few bits of info here?”. But connecting all those digital traces leads to detailed descriptions of a person’s life. We are talking about effective de-anonymization, profiling, identity theft …

I see two dangers here. One being the near-realtime tracking that “Please rob me” is addressing with their ironic service. The other is long-term data mining. In ten years, powerful computers will allow the HR department at ACME MegaCorp to data-mine all the stupid little bits you wrote and forgot about. And they may never tell you why you didn’t get that job…

I’m not paranoid. But it’s getting harder and harder to see what consequences using a specific web service has. We leave a few strokes here and there, but someone else may see the bigger picture.

ADT should sponsor this site.

burglar badges?

“Burglars, it seems, now have their own location-based social network too now.”

???

No burglar wants to risk someone coming home so the house being empty right now is not reason enough to think the coast is clear but, if you say you are going on vacation for a week or to a 3 hour long movie, the coast is clear. The house being empty by itself is not enough, its the accompanying time that allows burglars to utilize social networks.

isn’t it better to start a rumor website that correlates the check-ins of men and women at a same location around same time and comes up with predictions on who is hooking up with whom?.

Exactly so. Just because I’m not home it doesn’t mean my apartment is empty.

And here’s a clue for all you robbers out there: most people are at work or school all day!!! OMG ROB THEM!!!

You really don’t need foursquare to know when people aren’t home.

And frankly if someone is going to rob my place, I’d rather they do it when I’m not there. The alternative of them bashing my skull in with a baseball bat before making off with my PS2 seems less fun to me.

I’m going to go off and daydream about all the stuff I’ll buy with my insurance pay out after I’m robbed.

Brilliant. Innovative. Perfectly positioned to make money.

How much time do people actually spend at home apart from sleeping?

Foursquare doesn’t tell you where your home is, but your name/profile does. Depending upon what state you live in and the laws of your state/county, you can find out where someone owns a home in 5 minutes.

Um, It’s a legitimate fear for *anyone*, not just women. Men get crazy stalkers too.

HAHA

Perfect. Kinda evil, but perfect.

Important to remember though:
It’s not that social networks themselves are to blame — people just need to be “street smart” about how they use them & what they share there.

When we were little, it was “Don’t talk to strangers.”

But now, everyone is talking to strangers — so it’s “Don’t tell strangers anything you really shouldn’t let them know.”

On the other hand, if you leave no traces you may not get that job because you’re a paranoid nut.

Similar example; I’ve managed to avoid debt for most of my life. When I finally went to the bank to apply for a loan (to buy a car) they wouldn’t give me one because I had no credit history.

No credit history is worse than a bad credit history.

This also gives stalkers an excellent opportunity to stalk you on a deeper level.

Good to see TechCrunch deviating from favoritsm and posting an article which actually points out the downside of Foursquare – a service they have been inexplicably promoting the hell out of instead of covering a lot of other “real” businesses out there

This is definitely an issue for those that create a 4sq venue for their house and then regularly check in there, and other places.

I think the site is a great reminder to people that over-share.

really? how does a burglar know that you don’t live alone? If they researched you that much they would probably be aware that you work, or go to the gym, or go shopping regularly. + I can check in to a location on foursquare without being at that location. calm down.

The danger of these apps are that they tell people WHERE YOU ARE, not where you aren’t. Getting your home broken into while you’re gone is horrible, but not near as dangerous as getting assaulted, kidnapped or robbed in person.

If PleaseRobMe wanted to show the real dangers of these services, they should scrape Twitter feeds from women 12am-5am who mentioned “I’m so drunk” or “time to walk home” in their status update. That would be a serious eye-opener.

Robbers aren’t like vampires who need your invitation to enter your house. They don’t give a rats ass about your location

1) The only way someone is going to use social networks to assault, kidnap, or rob you, is if they were targeting you anyways. Got enemies much?

2) If someone is sober enough to write “I’m so drunk” or “its time to walk home” as a status update, they’re not at risk of being attacked any more than anyone else.

Quit fear mongering.

[...] Please Rob Me Makes Foursquare Super Useful For Burglars Create a free edublog to get your own comment avatar (and more!) [...]

Web 2.0 thieves, great

Interesting. The burglar on the site is obviously dark skinned, even though 90+ percentage of human images on the English language web are not.

Nice time for diversity to show up.

I am a bergler, I do it to suport my family. And this tool is really useful. Thanks.

Men are victims of rape too. But in both cases, the statistics are wildly skewed towards women being targeted.

A random guy who doesn’t personally know any weirdos is extremely unlikely to be targeted. Fear in that case is a little irrational.

You can page through a user’s Twitter statuses looking for geolocation data and read those tweets. One may reveal their home address.

All that data is naturally in the API, so you could even pay an Amazon mTurk to read “I may be home” tweets by the dozen and alert you to positives.

You could automate the larceny if you properly used cloud resources. It would not be hard to do.

Cute, but twitter and foursquare don’t have a gender field on profiles. It’s a great idea though!

I take that back. Foursquare has it.

Want to code it together? haha

You can approximate the amount of time someone will be away based on the venue and perhaps yelp information about the service type, if it’s a restaurant.

True I have thought of that…some places ask that you check in via Foursquare..

Gee, and what sane person would tweet to the world that his/her house is left unattended.. ?Somehow this reminds me of lootslinger, only this time it loots your goods on an ebay type of model website .

well okay, but foursquare history also likely shows your home address or equivalent.

great idea!

yeah, department of redundancy department

lets do it – we can sell the historical data to match.com, eharmony.com etc, so they can make recommendations to people like below:

‘Based on your profile, you should hangout at Starbucks on University Avenue between 7 and 8 PM, so you can meet all the rich VC types with pot bellies”

Go search some user profiles on Foursquare. There are many people who are the Mayor of their own home or office, giving it a clever name like Joe’s HQ, and providing an address to boot.

A tip I got recently from one of my friends – never load your “home” address in ur GPS. if the burglar finds your car all he needs to do is hit the “Go Home” button, open the grave with the garage opener in car and rob ur house

Hey Burglar; break in to my house while leaving some damage, so I can report to insurance company.

the usual argument of “well, somebody might be home”…

ever heard of casing the house first?

I’ve had friends and family whose house were robbed when they went on their honeymoon, and they were very careful about having people checking in on their house. Punching in that you’re in a foreign country makes it clear that not only you’re not likely to be home but most likely you’ll own things worth stealing.

Letting people know that you’re gone for a long time is just plain stupid.

If you believe this then QUIT your job because you aren’t home during the day Monday-Friday, you might get robbed! Sheesh.

On the other hand apparently burglary just doesn’t pay any more. Stuff is too cheap:

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6192SM20100210?feedType=RSS&feedName=oddlyEnoughNews&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+reuters/oddlyEnoughNews+%28News+/+US+/+Oddly+Enough%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

Hey all –

Just wanted to weigh in on this from foursquare’s perspective.

We take your privacy very seriously. That’s why every time you checkin we ask you whether you want to share your location, whether you want to push it to Twitter, whether you want to push it to Facebook.

For those of you who are foursquare users, you already know that only your friends get to learn about your whereabouts. On top of that, foursquare only knows where you are when you decide to tell us (by checking-in!)

Those points aside, looks like the PleaseRobMe Twitter account is just an auto-retweet of foursquare checkins that users have decided to sent to Twitter. Since most content on Twitter is public, you can find a lot of these checkins thru the Twitter Search API.

Truth is, you could make a similar app without using foursquare at all. Just try searching for “I’m headed to” like this:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=I%27m+headed+to

I definitely “get” the larger issue here – location is sensitive data and people should be careful about who and when they share it with. And at foursquare, we do everything we can to make sure that our users know with what people and social sites they are sharing their location with.

Happy to talk more about this if anyone has questions. Hit me up on the Twitter (@dens)

ps: I’m at the airport and my apartment is TOTALLY EMPTY right now!

- @dens
co-founder, foursquare

Isn’t this one of the many reasons to have a dog or 15?

Ya. Because most people live alone.

…Oh wait a minute… No they don’t…

There is someone in my house 99% of the time.

surely as long as you dont broadcast your home address, it doesnt matter if people dont know your there?

or even to use english that makes sense

surely as long as you dont broadcast your address, it doesnt matter if people KNOW your arent there.

if youre prepared to do all of that, wouldnt it make more sense to go into some form of internet based business?

anyway, isnt the share scale of foursquare protection in itself?

the “cant see the wood for the trees” defence as it were

well pleaserobme.com has a point in there.we shouldn’t expose too much information of our whereabouts.this can make unnecessary things happen to us then.either way it was a nice jokes to make this kind of sites. :-)

First – “I’m not home” != “No one is home”, or that no one is watching the house, or that there’s no alarm system.

Second, it’s not that hard to drive through a neighborhood and pick out the empty houses. Or to figure out someone’s schedule to know when they’re not home. Hint – go to a gym, pick someone who walks out, follow them home. Congrats, you now know their gym schedule and where they live.

Third, breaking into someone’s house is an inherently very risky crime with low payoff, and I think that serves as a greater deterrent than most anything else we can cook up. A burglar can never be sure the house is empty or that there’s no dog. It’s hard to do without being spotted by a neighbor and leaving behind lots of other physical evidence. And it takes excessive time to find where someone keeps their valuables, which may not be all that much. Pretty much the only people who do it are dumbass druggies, and they’re probably not the kind of people smart enough to be monitoring the social web to aid in their crimes.

And finally, that logo is racist.

Depends how long you want to wait before becoming profitable.

Not only does someone know that your not home but they could do things that are a lot worse by knowing where you go and when you go. The info that can be found out by thins can help plan out really devious acts which could include ‘the perfect murder’ etc.

I don’t understand how everyone continues to go to the “how would they know the house was empty” or “I live alone” points.

If I am going to rob someone, do I want to rob a place during the day (when most robberies do occur) knowing there could be any number of people there or when I know there is one less? It would be insanity easy to create a script that would find every fool on a social network that uses phrases including ‘home’ (insert additional logic here) and shows the geo-address of that post, scrape it and then monitor it. Maybe even find other people with geo-addresses near by. Then a tiny bit of human effort to connect dots and some email alerts and I would know when the best time to target a location would be. Even learn trends about when people usually get back. It’s terrifying how easy it would be. Glad my unemployed boyfriend is home all the time :) Take that potential robbers!

Lol o lol, what domain names ‘Please – Rob – ME’

The only solution to this problem is to do what a lot of people in America are afraid of – do what the English are doing. Put video cameras EVERYWHERE. Therefore, your movements can be tracked… Robbing certain people would certainly turn their love affair with company’s upside down.

yet another reason why all you suckers need to move to the city with a 24 hour doorman!

this site is totally amazing. good work, guys.

[...] » Please Rob Me » Please Rob Me Makes Foursquare Super Useful For Burglars [...]

Locked in the basement?

[...] Read it. [...]

[...] location-based networks (though right now all I'm seeing is Foursquare) that shows when … read the full article hereShare/Bookmark [...]

[...] Please Rob Me from TechCrunch. [...]

This all assumes that you know where I live and that my residence is not monitored.

The paranoia surrounding this is ridiculous. A large majority of the population are at work or school all day, so this is hardly telling robbers something they couldn’t already guess. And as other people have pointed out, most people don’t live alone, so knowing that one member of a household is out is hardly that handy. Chill out, people.

No, that would probably be 100% of the time, unless he’s accounting ofr escpape attempts.

Lots.

So what? People just now waking up to some of the negative uses to having no cyber privacy/confidentiality?

Anyone with even the smallest amount of computer savay can find out where someone is by their phone or car.

Anyone can get someone elses spending records, public records medical records and vurtually any other information that may be shared.

My sister is married to a law officer and she when to visit a relative he stayed behind, he told her where she went how long she was there and what she purchased when she went to there. He could do this in real time no delay. Any one can do this not just the police these days there are even sites that promote what I call privacy invasion!

Most people don’t opt out from the information sharing, and the joke of the matter is that there is no way to ensure that the information hasn’t already been shared by the time you get the form to opt out!, It should be that someone has to opt in!

Read the privacy flier sometime. The flier/form says that they won’t share the information and then right under maybe one or two paragraghs down it says that they will share your information. Almost all the fliers/forms are the same. I spoke with a few people on the matter of contridiction and none could explain how the information would not be or hasn’t already been shared.

The Patriot Act has been evolving through
reauthorizations to distort civil liberties, human
rights, privacy and much of the constitution itself.

Opponents of the law have criticized its authorization of indefinite detentions of immigrants; searches through which law enforcement officers search a home or business ithout the owner’s or the occupant’s permission or knowledge; the expanded use of National Security Letters, which allows the FBI to search telephone, e-mail, and financial records without a court order; and the expanded access of law enforcement agencies to business records, including library and financial records.

Basically now the Patriot Act Allows any and all data collections on all or anyone for any purpose.

I don’t think that the American constitution and the laws based upon it allow congress this much power and someone needs to challenge the legalities.

Everyone should read this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act

Fun Fact:

Citgroup is part of AIG and the trilateral commission, Citigroup owns Travelers(Insurer), Citigroup was formed from CDC (people who made hard drives and now are one of the largest collectors of human resource data), Metalmark Capital, formerly Morgan Stanley Capital Partners who is a private equity firm focused on leveraged buyout investments in middle market companies(small to medium size business) across a range of industries and many more who also represent what is referred to Global Wealth and Asset Management companies….many are even admitting joined it is documented that Citgroup, Salomon, Travelers,CDC, Smith barney and others also in the credit/health/human resources. Citigroup was formed by CDC…

Citi may merge with Goldman & Sachs?

I think it would be utterly hilarious if a burglar decided to try and rob my house while I wasn’t at home (which I rarely am — so the house is occupied by my large, ill-tempered house-husband and our neurotic, bitey dog.) Have at it fellas, and may dog have mercy on your soul!

some people never fail to look for racism where none is intended. thats your issue, not the sites designer. its a nuetral tone, neither too white, black, indian, chinese, paki, etc. its the color that we will all be one day. grow up.

First I heard of this was through a tweet from one of my friends: “@pleaserobme I’m not home, but my ex-Marine roommate is.”

[...] how such sites can be a boon to burglars, made the news. It was amazing the amount of commenters on sites like Techcrunch who seemed to find the idea that bad people might use social networking updates to victimize people [...]

I really hope this makes the front page.
1. Because it’s a cool story.
2. Because it was submitted by Java Delson!

[...] to show the dangers of tweeting out Foursquare check-ins. We, along with several other sites, covered it yesterday. And while it’s hard to take that site itself seriously, it does raise some interesting [...]

[...] TechCrunch: Please Rob Me Makes Foursquare Super Useful For Burglars. [...]

[...] für einen ordentlichen Lacher. Please Rob Me! Da wird einem in Form eines Web 2.0 Dienstes vor Augen geführt, was mir bereits seit der Einführung dieser neuen location-based-services schwer aufstößt: die [...]

[...] Location Internet may invite robbery Jump to Comments Please Rob Me is a stream of updates from various location-based networks  that shows when users check-in somewhere that is not their home. The idea, of course, is that if they’re not home, you can go rob them, says TechCrunch. [...]

[...] los peligros de las redes sociales y servicios basados en la localización. De esta manera, la misión de este servicio es conseguir que la gente se de cuenta de que es peligroso usar servicios (e.g. FourSquare) que permiten publicitar en cada momento dónde estás, porque eso [...]

[...] are you more likely to be robbed? [...]

The real culprit is the construction industry. They have not applied invisible paint on our houses.

[...] days have seen some brouhaha over location privacy issues. Please Rob Me brought up the potentially troubling issue of tweeting out your location updates (and Foursquare responded). But actually, Google is doing [...]

[...] days have seen some brouhaha over location privacy issues. Please Rob Me brought up the potentially troubling issue of tweeting out your location updates (and Foursquare responded). But actually, Google is doing [...]

[...] to show the dangers of tweeting out Foursquare check-ins. We, along with several other sites, covered it yesterday. And while it’s hard to take that site itself seriously, it does raise some interesting [...]

How does this work when you use Foursquare to tell Twitter that you’re at home? I’m the mayor of my house, with 166 check-ins. Please visit if you want a cup of tea.

This google buzz is no brainer, its weid stuff thats going to get messy somehow.

[...] days have seen some brouhaha over location privacy issues. Please Rob Me brought up the potentially troubling issue of tweeting out your location updates (and Foursquare responded). But actually, Google is doing [...]

[...] week, a new site called Please Rob Me arrived. The site used Foursquare users’ Twitter streams to show when exactly they had checked in to [...]

“A monetization model.”

HAHAHAHAHA! Literal lol. :)

>>> ps: I’m at the airport and my apartment is TOTALLY EMPTY right now! <<<

Hilarious final comment. :)

Thank you for weighing in on this.

[...] TechCrunch brought to light the Web site called Please Rob Me, which uses location-based services, like Foursquare, to see who is not at home. Basically, if you check in somewhere that isn’t at your house, it streams to this site. [...]

To many this would seem a scary scenario.

The truth is if a burglar wanted to see if your house was empty he could walk up and knock on your front door.
If someone was to answer he could just make out he was selling something.
If worried never give anyone, including location-based networks, your whereabouts.

[...] Please Rob Me Makes Foursquare Super Useful For Burglars [...]

[...] GO GADGET SEGMENT (Tech Talk)PleaseRobMe.com lets you know the easy burglary targetsIs MySpace about to become social [...]

[...] Foursquare Super Useful For Burglars Filed under: Uncategorized — tomlothian @ 4:00 am Please Rob Me Makes Foursquare Super Useful For Burglars MG Siegler on Feb 17, [...]

[...] ‘mashup’ van Twitter en Foursquare maakt het inbrekers erg gemakkelijk (Please Rob Me, Please Rob Me Makes Foursquare Super Useful For Burglars, Foursquare Responds To Please Rob Me: Please Shut [...]

[...] have all heard the privacy buzz around Google Buzz and the media frenzy around PleaseRobMe. Most importantly, even the Congress is thinking about passing a bill on Online [...]

This is some scary stuff!

Once again it all comes down to what do you tell the world?? There’s should be a fine line between ‘what your doing’ and ‘what your thinking’. You don’t have to S-P-E-L-L it out!! I guess people just take things too literally!!

[...] recent news around PleaseRobMe is a perfect example of this. As a single woman, I’ve always been wary of revealing too much [...]

Okay I think all of you are missing the point! There is no need what so ever to tell everyone where you are every minute of the day. You have the choice to how private you make your life and if you want to be an internet slut and let everyone know every detail go ahead but when it comes back to bite you in the butt suck it up and deal with it!

[...] On FourSquare: http://www.colinalsheimer.com/foursquare-friend-requests http://www.mpdailyfix.com/do-you-play-foursquare/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/17/please-rob-me-makes-foursquare-super-useful-for-burglars/ [...]

[...] One day before the opening of the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas Foursquare announced a record breaking number of 275k check ins on a single day. This number will be beaten, if not shattered, over the weekend but it already is a clear indicator of location based services constantly growing in popularity despite privacy and security concerns. [...]

[...] Please Rob Me [...]

[...] is some debate on the downsides of location based applications such as foursquare. Please Rob Me is a spoof of Foursquare that demonstrates how burglars could use the location information to find [...]

[...] 0:05:08  Please Rob Me [...]

Has anyone actually ever been robbed due to foursquare or twitter? come on people. just use your head (as with any social networking site) before posting anything. Dont ping to FB or Twitter.

[...] I’ve also noticed some criticism, such as the suggestion that Foursquare could be “super useful for burglars” (there was a response by [...]

4 square makes it easy to catch burglars who post their current locations.

[...] with social detractors such as stalkers and the “Please Rob Me” uproar, it’s interesting to look at how quickly the momentum for location aware services is taking [...]

[...] based services like Foursquare, Gowalla and others are increasing in usage but there are definite privacy concerns with sharing your exact location with the world. Rally Up recently launched its location based [...]

[...] email signature. My mom is ahead of the curve when it comes to location-based technology. Forget Foursquare, my mom just puts her home address on every email she sends. Mom, email is not anywhere near as [...]

[...] their GPS lat/long coordinates to its database of venues (businesses, points of interest, even people’s homes). Later I followed up by email and asked Crowley, “Isn’t the quality of your places directory, [...]

This is exactly the reason why I laugh at the idea of seriously using Foursquare. Trading privacy for being trendy, supposedly? Ha.

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