1. Programmers write apps that no one ever asked for but may be able to use.<p>2. Widespread adoption of apps that no one ever asked for but may be able to use.<p>3. Holy shit, what have we done to ourselves?<p>4. Programmers write apps to minimize the consequences of widespread adoption of apps that no one ever asked for but may be able to use.<p>5. Widespread adoption of apps to minimize the consequences of widespread adoption of apps that no one ever asked for but may be able to use.<p>What a great time to be a programmer.
To be fair, pretty much every single person with a job leaves their home empty all day. Everyone already knows this.<p>I can't wait until I get to read about someone who decided to rob one of these people, but then gets shot to death by the spring gun they set up. Bonus if the spring gun auto-uploads to YouTube.
This is the ultimate free source of leads for home security and alarm businesses.<p>Edit: They could drive around the neighborhood dropping off flyers saying, "While you were out at "place homeowner checked into" someone could have been robbing you blind.
Having worked for a Defense Contractor and been forced to go through social engineering training in the past, the idea of gathering information like this is very real and happens everyday. Hopefully this makes people think twice before exposing certain personal information online for all to see.
Most of this data is completely useless, because there's no way to tell where these users live, at least without a serious amount of stalking and sleuthing.<p><i>Unless</i>, of course, they've been geotagging their tweets from a mobile device. In which case it would then be trivial to look at their most frequent location, determine it's a residential one, wait until they're out, and head on over.<p>Which is why I will <i>never</i> enable Twitter geotagging.
<i></i>Feature Request<i></i>: can you setup an affiliate program that gives me a cut of the "take" when a thuggishly inclined friend uses this to rob someone? thx!<p>-jlb
I love it. Perhaps I'm paranoid, but this is exactly the problem I see with continually updating the public about your daily activities and whereabouts.<p>I learned a long time ago that you DON'T tell people you don't trust whether you'll be away from your house and when, but indeed, thousands of people are posting about that on blogs, Twitter or facebook all the time.<p>Time to relearn old lessons - in the 80s there were warnings about answering messages that said "We're out of town, be back next week!". Then, in the 90s there were warnings about email auto-responders that said "I'm travelling for business, be back next week!". Now the opportunity to tell the public your house is unoccupied has moved to the next technology.
Sure, they got us all to talk about the lovely site they've built, but I'm not entirely convinced of the premise. Indeed, there are criminals that would take the time to stake out someone's house just by checking up on their Foursquare check-ins, but for the vast majority of folks, I'm not buying it.<p>We had our car stolen out of the driveway one day after my mom was warming it up in the morning (I'm hearing this is illegal in places like Maryland). She doesn't do this every morning, BTW. What was interesting, though, is that the criminals weren't even smart enough to steal a car that had a full tank of gas. My parents later ran into them (fate is awesome) pushing that car into a gas station not too far from our house after it ran out of gas. I doubt these guys would have been smart enough to case our house based on my Foursquare check-ins. That morning, they were just walking through the neighborhood and saw an opp.<p>Furthermore, I think the site is also rather silly because it presupposes that <i>everyone</i> knows what Foursquare (or any of the other location-based check-in sites) is enough to make check-in data particularly useful. Contrary to popular belief, there is a whole contingent of people out there who have no clue about Twitter, Foursquare, TechCrunch or anything else we hold dear. :)<p>Finally, I have a tendency to check in on FS as I'm <i>leaving</i> a location, so I get the points, but I'm already rolling out of the parking lot and back to my house by the time the world knows where I've <i>been</i>.
I think this falls into the same jurisdiction as Wappr does (<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1123173" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1123173</a> if you missed that conversation), where you're aggregating info from people that may not want it used as such. I know that this is trying to prove a point, and yes, the Twitter account for pleaserobme sends tweets to people who get listed on the site, but it's still a little heavy handed.
This is pretty awesome. I've never twittered when I'm away from my place for a long period of time. I don't post about it to facebook. And I don't set email auto-responders. I guess my inner criminal automatically notified me that were I actually in the job of stealing, I would definitely use social media to pick likely targets.<p>In fact, generally no one knows I was away until I get back, short of close friends and family.
Awesome linkbait / PR execution by these guys. This has mainstream media potential - it's easy to imagine a hysterical CNN headline.<p>I hope they have a plan for how to put all this great buzz and inbound links to work on a real business.
Now that I think about it, I could make a pretty neat little social engineering mobile game out of this. With the back end tied in to this, you could make a geo-aware app that lets you "tag" people as robbed or whatnot.<p>Of course, that's more than a little evil, as I'd probably map it, and then you would have a site for sharing all the information associated with opportunities, and I have no doubt that some entrepreneurial spirit would take that information and use it to actually start robbing houses.
"burglarized" still makes me chuckle when I see it written.<p>(It is not a valid word in English).<p>edit: Yes, I know it's valid in <i>American</i>.<p>Burgled (English), Burglarized (American English).
I've thought of something like this for Mexico (later expanding to other latinamerican countries) : A mashup of foursquare, gowalla and blippy (the blippy part is important, we won't target poor people) and I would call it 'secuestra.me' (kidnap.me).<p>Huge potential, big market worth several billions.
Something tells me that heavy users of foursquare have already considered the implications of letting people know where they are at all times. I don't think this site will deter these people from checking in somewhere.
Makes me think a twitter bot might be useful, that takes over the account and twitters mundane activities (cooking, watching TV,...). If you leave the house, you can switch on the twitter bot.
<a href="http://www.torproject.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.torproject.org/</a> make sure you put on your rubber before trolling for your next "project"