Rhymes with Cars

At the end of the year, I read Michael Fertik's great post, 2010: The Year of Atomic Branding on my friend Jennifer Leggio's blog. I file this under 'scary - interesting' and I thought that was the end of it.

A couple of weeks later, I'm in the city for the weekend with my family. We had just trudged through the rain and were sitting in the bar of the St. Francis. The kids having hot chocolate, me having a martini and I checked in on Foursquare. The act of checking in on Foursquare when I'm with my family delights my kids because they like to know the Mayor of places. The act of checking in on Foursquare pisses my wife off to no end and has been the cause of many a shopping spree.

This time, she simply said "So now everyone that follows you knows that we aren't at home and we are over an hour away. How many people follow you and how much do you trust them not to rob us?' I wish she would have stopped there, but of course, she follows that up with "How often do you check in, telling the world that you aren't home, but maybe me and the kids are?"

Flashback to Michael Fertik's article, the potential threat of oversharing on social networks.

Of course this got me thinking about how safe location based social networks are. How vulnerable are we?

I've heard interesting stories about people & stalkers and being dumped or being fired because of FourSquare. I haven't heard about people being robbed. Yet.

A week or so later, I did a simple check to see how vulnerable we really are. I did a quick search for people in San Francisco sharing their status on Twitter and checked in on FourSquare or Gowalla. It's a simple query using Twitter's advanced search capability.

What I found amazed me. People checked in all over the place. FourSquare was living up to it's reputation. However, an easy cross check from Twitter - where people tend to put their full name and where they live, with WhitePages.com let me easily figure out where people lived. I don't mean just the city, but also their exact address and even a nice little Google Map with directions to get there.

Of course, not everyone is easy to find on WhitePages.com, but my quick little informal experiment yielded about a 25% hit rate. I got freaked out. No more FourSquare for me. In the old days, burglars would prowl around neighborhoods looking for empty houses.  Today, they simply need to search for affluent neighborhoods and look for people who have checked in at places more than a few hours away.  The movie theater for example.

I took it one step further.  Here is a feed for people who have checked in or are posting "I'm at" the key phrase for both Gowalla and FourSquare.  When people say where they are, they also say where they aren't (home, for example).

Glad I have an alarm system. How long until someone really malicious does a nice little Twitter / WhitePages mash-up?

Photo by Johnny Grim.

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