Archive for March, 2010

Please Rob Me? OK! Says Burglar

Not too long ago, a social experiment called PleaseRobMe launched, displaying the aggregated real-time updates from Foursquare users who used the service’s social sharing feature to broadcast their updates publicly on Twitter. Although that site has since been shuttered, the point they were trying to make still resonates: sharing your physical location with a public network is a dangerous and really dumb idea.

… but people do not seem to get it, and I wonder how many of these cases we will hear in 2010 and following, with the coming of the new wave of location-based social networks.
Figuring how to create a scraper that extracts lots of information from publicly available data is not that hard, after all.