PleaseRobMe.com Warns of Dangers of Posting Your Location to Foursquare iPhone App

(Feb. 18) -- Social networking: It's all fun and games until somebody gets robbed. That's the warning three Dutch Web designers are trying to drive home about Foursquare, an iPhone application that allows users to post their location to Twitter, where it becomes public knowledge. Their message is that the potential of the microblogging service is probably as obvious to thieves as it is to everyone else.

To better illustrate their point, Boy Van Amstel, Frank Groeneveld and Barry Borsboom created the aptly named PleaseRobMe.com. The Web site, which makes its satirical intentions clear, features a list of "all those empty homes out there," generated, of course, by the frighteningly simple process of pulling location-based tweets from Twitter.

"It's basically a Twitter search -- nothing new," Van Amstel told BBC News. "Anyone who can do HTML and JavaScript can do this. You could almost laugh at how easy it is. ... Not long ago it was questionable to share your full name on the Internet. We've gone past that point by 1,000 miles."

Indeed, Thursday morning, it didn't take more than a cursory search of Foursquare.com to reveal that several randomly selected users were somewhere other than their homes. At about 10:40 a.m., for example, Kirsten of Boston clocked in from the Longwood Starbucks. "Do grab a skinny vanilla latte," she tweeted.

One more thing for thieves to love about Foursquare? When users tweet their location, the app actually maps the address for everyone in their network to see. On Foursquare, the resulting information looks like this (via PleaseRobMe.com):

Gawker's Ryan Tate broke down the ramifications: "We realize you want to brag about the party you're at, or maybe are desperate to enliven it with some fresh blood. But do not do this, because it means giving up their address, and if your friend ever tweets about being on vacation, the savvy thieves will know exactly who to burgle next."

Van Amstel was careful to note that PleaseRobMe.com was not intended to inspire crime, but to create awareness. "People were checking in at their house, or their girlfriend's or friend's house, and sharing the address -- I don't think they were aware of how much they were sharing," he told BBC.

Perhaps most disturbing is that PleaseRobMe.com only took four hours to create. All their handiwork is "is a dressed up Twitter search page," the developers write on the site. "Everybody can get this information."