It's 2 o'clock. Do You Know Where Your Friends Are?

In the past few years, most of us have changed the way that we view online privacy. A couple of years ago, the idea of talking to strangers on the internet was a much scarier prospect. Internet safety was a big topic, and there were many debates about the safety of personal information being sent via email. We were all given safety tips like, don't tell strangers your real name or where you live, don't post pictures of your children and be careful who you give your email or phone number to. But now, this doesn't seem to be as big of a concern to most of us.

The advent of social media has made all of us live in a much more connected world. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare and other sites have made sharing our most personal information seem fun and risk free. This is the point that Frank Groeneveld, Barry Borsboom and Boy van Amstel have been trying to make with their website PleaseRobMe.com. After seeing how many of their friends use services like Foursquare to “check in” to locations and post them via twitter from their mobile phone, they decided to make a site that picked up all the data from social media sites to make a database of what homes are now currently empty. The goal was to expose the risks in oversharing locational information, but many people felt that the site was trying to make burglary easy.

Many of us are familiar with the tweets and status updates of our friends that let us know where they are by reporting their “check ins” but this information also lets everyone know when our friends are not-at home. Not only this, but when our friends come to visit us and “check in” with a locational service like foursquare, our address is being publish for basically all the world to see. These services are fun and I have to admit that I enjoy finding out where my friends are, but this just makes giving away our privacy look like a cool thing to do. And when we punch our friends in the face (like the site says we ought) when they “check in” when they arrive at our door, we can appear to be party poopers.

What every happened to the idea of privacy? So many people are so outraged at PleaseRobMe for compiling the list of data, but the reality is that their site is little more than a dressed up twitter page. The information is out there, and whether we want to believe it or not, not everyone on our Facebook friends list or our Twitter followers are people that we would trust with our phone number, address or an extra key to our house. So I think we can all take a lesson from this and try to put the need to feel connected with our friends in balance with the need for locational security. Be careful out there on the internet. The more that we are all connected, the more important it is to guard your personal information, and there is not much information more personal and important than your current physical location.

By Melissa Kennedy- Melissa is a freelance writer and regular contributor to several websites and other publications, a volunteer, a full time mom and an active job seeker.