25Feb

Joey Woodbury

Twitter users causing their own robberies!

Twitter users beware you are causing your own Twoubles; you may inadvertently become an accomplice to a robbery, at your own house!

PleaseRobMe.com is now aggregating Twitter/FourSquare posts and letting viewers of their website know when the homes of Twitter users check in and are not at home.

please_rob_meWhile the functionality of the site does not guide you to the home of the Tweeter, I wanted to find out how hard it would actually be to find someone’s home.

I went to PleaseRobMe.com to find my “victim”. I randomly clicked on one of the posts within the website, which took me to the poster’s Twitter Page. Within seconds I had my hands on their name and location.

twitter accountNow that I have that info, what’s next? Whitepages.com of course, so I entered the name and location of my “victim” and received the result I was looking for.

Not only did I receive the full address, but I now know his age range and that he has a wife living there with him.  Now the only step left was to get directions to my “victim’s” house. So I went to Google Maps and entered the address, which not only gave me directions but a street view of his home.

whitepagesAlright now everyone can tell me that I am a Twalker (Tweeter Stalker). But the real reason for this post and the intention of the website PleaseRobMe.com is to raise awareness of how vulnerable people are. The other reason (and this is my favorite) is that I always told my wife not to post personal information especially about when we are not home and this proves me right which rarely happens!

The scariest fact is that I did this for two other random posts on PleaseRobMe.com and I was able to run the same process with the same result and each one took less the 15 google_shotseconds.  And I could’ve gone one step further and mapped how far the “victim” is from their FourSquare location to their home so I knew how much time I had to “rob” them.

And to throw this out there can we start calling these people Twobbers (Twitter Robbers)?

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There is 1 Perspective

Jessica RoweFebruary 25th, 2010 at 10:55 pm

Great post Joey. Using various social platforms and apps can be fun, but it does require some thought. Giving away too much information online can be very dangerous. As Foursquare and apps like it grow in popularity, users will need to protect themselves from being targeted.

In Foursquare, it is simple to un-link your Twitter profile from the account. From the app, go to “preferences” and de-select the “tell twitter” option. Then, when a Foursquare user checks in, Twitter does not update, and sites like PleaseRobMe have nothing to share.

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