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You should let http://pleaserobme.com/ know they are obsolete then. Also, not all of us have our lights on so our silhouettes can be seen when we're home. Also, this enables burglars to target people without having to be in their proximity -- they're not in superposition peeking through everyone's windows at once, you know. Also, your shoe is untied. Gotcha!

Indeed, they might not care at all, but they act like they may give an iota of a crap.

The debacle with Google collecting Publicly Open Unencrypted WiFi Communications was controversial, and even intentional *gasp*, yet:

But, the commission said, Google did not engage in illegal wiretapping because the data was flowing, unencrypted, over open radio waves.

I concede this means little regarding moral privacy, I mean they did it anyway, right?!

It was a wake-up call to people who are too ignorant or lazy to secure their networks. People need to learn, good for Them!

It falls in line with a campaign to raise awareness about what information you put out there.

I would largely agree. Unfortunately, I believe it is because real security - cryptography and end-to-end security and privacy - are very difficult, and hence, very expensive to develop, implement, and test. My experience with such coding is that it's every bit, if not more, rigorous as code written for medical devices or flight control software. It simply has to be bulletproof. Any one hole in the theory, algorithm, or implementation - and the whole thing comes apart. Learning about all those possible holes and plugging them is a herculean task. One can point to the near constant stream of security patches for every browser, app, and OS on the market. And these are the best-funded commercial enterprises around.

Another huge problem is the 'meh' attitude people have towards their personal information. We throw our data around so willy-nilly on smart phones and social networks. We check in places that tell everyone where we are (or are not http://pleaserobme.com/ ), publicly publish our most intimate family and friend relationships, report where we live and work, we even identify people to image recognition software. One expert I heard said that he could not imagine a more dastardly personal information monitoring system than Facebook. And we WILLINGLY give that information away. Google reads your emails and all the documents you upload to their 'free' services. Websites use everything they can to target ads at you, etc.

The unfortunate part, as my CS security professor pointed out, is that by the time it crosses an ethical line - it's nearly impossible to stop. Even worse, what if the company you gave all that info too gets sold to a very un-scrupulous person in a country with no protections? What if your government is taken over and they raid these databases for information about dissenters? All of these things are real, happen today, and yet we consider it more important to be able to brag to our friends and family what we had for dinner last night than protect ourselves.

funny. And how is this app any different than http://pleaserobme.com/. Same type of data (who you are) one wanting to share where you're not, the other to share where you are. Glad my teenage girl is almost entirely invisible on FB.

you're right, this isn't much different than http://pleaserobme.com/ -- and it even has a high chance of being effective. any girl stupid enough to make her facebook account public is more likely to sleep with the kind of guy that needs this app. just sayin

Check out http://pleaserobme.com/ for how this information can be collected/correlated by the smart, then abused by the unsophisticated.

Anyone remember Please Rob Me?

Obligatory:

http://pleaserobme.com/

of this app.

Oblig. link

http://www.pleaserobme.com/ had it dead on. Before they took it down, they basically had a real-time feed with a linked Google Map showing houses that could likely be robbed *right now*, because the author (who "owns" that house on FourSquare", tagged themself as not being home.

I have yet to see any real use for FourSquare at all, other than this inane social networking game. If you want to share your location with trusted friends, use Google Latitude. Why on earth do you think everyone on the planet cares that you visit the corner Starbucks every day? The only people who would care about that are criminals and stalkers (yes ladies, FourSquare is basically a stalkers paradise).

Simple answer to the privacy solution: Don't put any information on Facebook that you don't want used by marketers/against you/exposed to the world. No matter WHAT the Facebook privacy policy says, putting your picture/address/phone number/vacation schedule online is a bad move. Why? Because once the information is out there, it is out of your control. Even if Facebook offers a guaranteed privacy policy that your information will NEVER be shared with ANYONE, what about hackers? What about internal Facebook employees that sell your data on the black market? What about "former" Facebook friends that now decide to do something nasty with your data, e.g. sign you up as a donor/interested party in the Church of Scientology? Think I'm just another "tinfoil-hat wearing paranoiac?" Read Database Nation sometime. A little data goes a long way. http://www.databasenation.com/home.htm The bottom line is that Facebook users need to be smarter about what they put online. Anyone who would put their vacation schedule online, a.k.a. "when I won't be home" is asking to be robbed. By the way, the same applies to Twitter. There was a site set up to illustrate how dumb Twitter users are in announcing where they are every minute of the day http://pleaserobme.com/ Smarten up Facebook denizens. The power to protect your privacy is in YOUR hands. Don't let this issue become another "we need the government to step in" situation. The smart man digs his well BEFORE he is thirsty. Think ahead.

Society is broken, not the ideas that circulate freely, no matter what anyone would wish. GPS in phones - useful to owners, and to thieves, as in http://pleaserobme.com/. P2P and copyrights, anonymity, credit info, privacy rights, games. Lots of things have good and bad, legal and illegal, moral and immoral sides. I believe that in most instances, society is just having trouble adapting and finding the right way to do it, but it will change regardless, it's up to our actions to guide it. And simple easy answers that worked in the past won't do any good sometimes. Credit cards? Silly details, society and economics is totally broken.

Somebody's already way ahead of you on that one.

http://pleaserobme.com/

The guardian angel can take automated action on behalf of the user for various purposes (e.g., to compensate for memory loss, to remind a user to take medicine, to assist in social interactions by indicating whether the user has met an individual before, to gauge the appropriateness of jokes or comments given the demographics of the audience, etc.).

I'm slightly confused... Microsoft does this while complaining about privacy intrusion? I suppose the information may not be sent back to Microsoft as in Chrome's case, couldn't this be bad if some random person saw or got hold of that information? There's already a site that does that.

also:

[T]he monitoring component can take note of the number of conversations occurring in a room (and more specifically, a breakdown of the types of people in the room accompanied by a warning for dangerous persons, based on sex offender registration, FBI most wanted, etc.). The monitoring component sends relevant information for current or future decisions to the decision-making component that analyzes the information within the context of personal preference data stored in the user-attribute store in order to make a suggestion or implement a decision.

Where are the "decision-making component" and "user attribute store" located? Is it sending names for inspection across the internet just because their name is mentioned in a conversation? I hate to think that anyone's computer might be dropping eaves on me at any given moment. :)

typo in your url points to an ad farming website
http://pleaserobme.com/

No, this isn't the state doing it.. it's people.. and it doesn't require a totalitarian state.. it could happen anywhere where there is a large crowd of bored people (aka; internet users.. it's ok.. i'm one of them).

Between the recent wave of location-aware apps and privacy concerns of places like Facebook, this will only get more common. Next thing you know we'll have people just jumping others they don't like (race,creed, sexuality preferences, so on) and other commiting location-aware crimes.

I love that GPS game where people broadcast to the entire web on Foursquare/Twitter that they're not home so you rob their houses blind! :D http://pleaserobme.com

Some people just don't care about privacy. A good example shown by http://pleaserobme.com/