Location-Based Social Networks: Delightful, Dangerous or Somewhere in Between?

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.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 31st, 2010 at 16:09 and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Location-Based Social Networks: Delightful, Dangerous or Somewhere in Between?”

On privacy-risks of location-based networks, again | Marco Olivo April 8th, 2010 at 10:09

[...] A few days ago I blogged about location-based services and their privacy risks and implications. [...]

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