Social networking services from Twitter and Foursquare to Yelp and Buzz encourage users to log in and share their location.
It's packaged as a fun way to find your friends and stay social--but what's the cost?
The new site 'Please Rob Me' aims to make online tell-alls aware of the potential downside to public location-sharing.
The danger is publicly telling people where you are. This is because it leaves one place you're definitely not... home. So here we are; on one end we're leaving lights on when we're going on a holiday, and on the other we're telling everybody on the internet we're not home. It gets even worse if you have "friends" who want to colonize your house. That means they have to enter your address, to tell everyone where they are. Your address.. on the internet.. Now you know what to do when people reach for their phone as soon as they enter your home. That's right, slap them across the face.
'Please Rob Me' aggregates and streams location check-ins into a list of 'all those empty homes out there,' and describes the recently-shared locations as 'new opportunities.'
The site even allows you to filter the list tweets by location, or by Twitter user.