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IF YOU FIND yourself somewhere nice this weekend, would you be tempted to let the world know by using your social media tool of choice to ‘check in’?
What if you checked in again when you went home. Would you give it a second thought?
The website weknowyourhouse.com may make you start to think twice about doing it again, however. Calling itself a ‘social network privacy experiment’, it searches Twitter for tweets that contain the phrase ‘at home’ and takes the location information, if any, that accompanies it.
This location information, in the form of latitude and longitude values, is turned into an address using a process called geocoding, which essentially takes these numbers as inputs and spits out a human readable address – potentially your address.
At this point, all that’s required is Google Street View, which the site then uses to get a picture of the building at that address.
The message to users on the explainer page of the experimental site is simple:
A general piece of advice is don’t check in at your own home because you’re sharing that information with the world.
Scary, but true.
Wow…. Before all this was invented you had to crack open a phone book to find out where someone lived.
True but now when you check in somewhere else there is a good chance the house is empty….. Maybe even emptier when you return home.
Don’t worry… My house tweets the neighbourhood and all major law enforcement agencies as soon as someone breaches the perimeter
If that’s true, that’s actually class. Phonebook wouldn’t do that though!
Like other white male, aged 30-40, blood type A+, 5’9” tall, 75KG, I do not give away personal information.
Yup, I admit it, my real name is Shanti.. I had some crazy hippie parents who named me after the Om Shanti Shanti Shanti mantra.. And like my social media has always said, I live away with the Faeries..
Have never understood why people use foursquare and Facebook places.. I have all my location services turned off, and the ability for anyone else to check me in switched off. There’s too many bloody weirdos on the Internet (too many bloody weirdos in real life as well!)
like me hahaha
Bugger all I hope
Has anyone directly related a burglary to a post they made online that contained gps coordinates to their house? I don’t know of anyone anyway…
Good idea Lauren
Obviously my full name. Click on my name and you can’t even find my twitter account :-)
Feck all, just check out my profile.
With a little social engineering it would be very possible to pinpoint your or pretty much anyones location.. You don’t need to rely on blatant stupidity for this.
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