got geoint?

Welcome to the Friday’s Food for Thought post on got geoint? We hope everyone had a productive work week and are ready for some weekend relaxation. Is part of your weekend relaxation involve leaving the house? Perhaps going out to dinner with friends? And, are you a big fan of location sharing (i.e., letting the whole world know that you are away from your house)? Well, then, perhaps you are sharing too much and letting potential burglars know that you are away from your house? This week’s FFT post focuses on how in this age of information- and location-ubiquity (is that really a term?) can potentially leave us vulnerable.

Please Rob Me and The Problem with Social Media
The Christian Science Monitor recently explored the pros and problematic cons of online services that announce where you are at any given moment. A new website takes this fear to a somewhat humorous extreme. Please Rob Me mocks all of the FourSquare users that have told Twitter to automatically broadcast their whereabouts. In a perfect world, the two social networking sites pair up nicely – tell FourSquare that you’ve checked into your office or arrived at a bumping party, and Twitter lets your friends know that this might not be a good time to bug you, or that they’d better join the fiesta. Read the full Christian Science Monitor article here.

The Facts About Home Invasions
The frightening thing about home invasion is that it is often motivated by a variety of criminal intentions. Usually the intention is robbery. It is common for invaders to suddenly pull a weapon and burglarize you on the spot after impersonating a repairman, a delivery boy, salesman, policeman or an individual in the need of Good Samaritan. In a worst case scenario the intention is rape, kidnapping, torture or terrorism. In these situations, an armed invader takes the victim by surprise simply by kicking in the door or bursting through a window. Sometimes the invasion is motivated by the desire to procure normally private information from you such as your credit card or bank account number that can later be sold or used for fraudulent purposes. Read more from ReaHomeSafety.com here.

How Many Home Robberies Are There Per Year?
While we are having a hard time finding actual stats on home robberies, according to Cha Cha, in the U.S. a burglary occurs once every 14.6 seconds, or about 5918 per day. Wow. That’s a lot of robberies happening. We wonder if all the press coverage of PleaseRobMe.com has increased this stat. And, it has taken us about 15 seconds to write this portion of this post – so man, someone just had their house robbed. We are heading home right now to make sure we locked the front door!

Location Sharing: Yay or Nay?
The location sharing bubble might have started back in ye olde Loopt days but now everyone is on the bandwagon: Yahoo! with Fire Eagle (Fire Bagel as once internally called by Y! employees), Google with their recently announced Latitude, BrightKite, Whrrl, Groovr, Moximity and bundles of others. Alongside all of these products, there are developer-oriented tools like Mozilla Geode that help developers find their users’ locations (once asked) from their computer and do whatever with it. However, this all begs the question why? Read the full Paul Stamatiou blog post here.

Jane’s Addiction Been Caught Stealing BBC Live
We were racking our brains trying to find a song about home robberies to showcase, but alas the best we could come up with is Jane’s Addiction’s “Been Caught Stealing.” Check out this live BBC clip from 1993. Enjoy and happy Friday!

Tags: Been Caught Stealing, got geoint?, Jane's Addiction, Location Sharing, Please Rob Me, PleaseRobMe.com, Safe Location Sharing