Please Rob Me: The Sky is Falling
If you’re active at all on the location based status update sites like BrightKite or Foursquare, then you’ve more than likely heard about the Please Rob Me website. A good friend let me know about the site and he’s stopped using both sites cold turkey.
The gist of the site is that the folks behind the Please Rob Me site take all the updates from Foursquare and post them together in one place. The idea is that along with telling all our friends where we’re at, we’re also broadcasting to the worldwide public where we’re not at that moment… at home.
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.
I understand the obvious risks, but I’m wondering if we’re maybe blowing this a bit out of proportion? Has there ever been a robbery or home invasion reported that was spurred on because someone checked-in somewhere else at that moment?
Perhaps I should also let people know my wife just might be a stay-at-home-mom, that doesn’t update her geo-location status and knows how to operate a shotgun. Would that help?
Honestly, I think this could be fixed fairly easily. Allow people to only share updates with their friends that they approve and confirm.
What do you think? Should we all stop using these services? Or just stop worrying about every potential thing that might go wrong in our lives.
[Editor’s Note: Anton cross-posted this at EveryJoe. –mrh]
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