A website that provides minute by minute updates on people who are not at home has sparked concern that it will encourage burglars. The site, called Please Rob Me, launched this week and has been criticised for being the perfect tool for any self-respecting housebreaker.
But the three brains behind the website insist they’re not helping criminals, but highlighting the dangers of the latest social networking craze of announcing to the world where you are at any given moment via the internet. Social networking crazes such as Foursquare, in which users post their location online, are a goldmine for potential burglars, the website’s founders said. The Please Rob Me website says: ‘Our intention is not, and never has been, to have people burglarized.’
Instead they are trying to alert people to the danger of putting too much information on the world wide web. The Dutch website channels information from other networking sites like Twitter into one place, listing ‘all those empty homes out there’ and providing a running total of ‘new opportunities’. The information it provides on people’s movements is searchable by city or by their Twitter username.
‘We’re leaving the lights on when we’re going on a holiday, but we’re telling everybody on the internet we’re not home,’ said co-founder Frank Groeneveld, 22.
This is just horrible. If these people stop posting where they are… how are we going to live without that?
I wonder about Facebook when it say ‘Benjamin is attending the event “Searching for Obama’s birth certificate”‘ that burglars would think I am in (Hawaii or Kenya depending on your ideology) or just not home.
Maybe when I am away, I will have to put my status to “Benjamin is in his living room cleaning his guns.”
What is a moran?
DU got scooped by cagematch again.
Click here.
#3 – This is the original moran and the start of the internet meme of using moran to indicate stupider than a moron.
The neighbors are on vacation and the guy across the street is a nazi douchenozzle. Now I’m missing some stuff and I am pissed. The shit’s hitting the fan and hard.
Was the lobotomy painful?
#1 “This is just horrible. If these people stop posting where they are…”
Post anonymously.
#8
That doesn’t work here in US. We like to be known, unlike other countries like Japan where most posts are done anonymously. Here, we have an image to uphold. Get it straight! 🙂
Thank DU for example,
http://5z8.info/cockfights_v5l2_how2printmoney
Finally, a useful application of Twitter.
Reminds me of that idiot (in Florida, I think) who tweeted he and his wife were going on vacation out of the country and someone broke into his home and stole his very high dollar video/editing equipment. Which he mentioned in earlier tweets about his business.
#8 I was wondering who was going to bite on that.
I always thought that the spelling was ‘MORON’
As in:-
See the happy Moron, he doesn’t give a damn
I wish I was a Moron (Oh God! Perhaps I am)
Or.
Maybe I’m missing the point, some kind of irony?
Moran – Professor Moran, was Sherlock Holmes bitter enemy wasn’t he?
Also, old coots like me remember Professor Moran as being Winston Churchill’s private doctor. Churchill, of course, died in the end, a reflection perhaps of Moran’s skills.
What do doctors know – not a lot it seems, they all seem to die quite frequently.
Norman..it was spelled out for you in #5. Pictures and everything. So do we have to rename you?
Hey world I’m not home! Rob me!
(Conveniently not mentioning the fact I own an illegal exotic tiger with a penchant for human flesh)