Slashdot Mirror
Burglary Ring Used Facebook Places To Find Targets
Kilrah_il writes "A burglary ring was caught in Nashua, NH due to the vigilance of an off-duty police officer. The group is credited with 50 acts of burglary, the targets chosen because they posted their absence from home on the Internet. '"Be careful of what you post on these social networking sites," said Capt. Ron Dickerson. "We know for a fact that some of these players, some of these criminals, were looking on these sites and identifying their targets through these social networking sites."' Well, I guess the prophecies came true."
And Google Street View's a gift for casing the joint - checking houses without burglar alarms, or with old/cheap ones
Yeah because you can totally see a burglar alarm from the street -- with google's resolution you can't even see if they have a sticker in the window.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
The problem is, the media jumps on all this stuff like its brand new, thieves did the same thing ages ago. Just drive around a neighborhood where someone said at the bar they were going out of town and break in with a car with cheap magnetic decals of a cable company/telephone company/whatever.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Regarding online safety, security through obscurity should not be overlooked. It's crap like this (and stuff in the work place) as to why I don't blab on about intimate details of my life to strangers.
Life is not for the lazy.
i don't understand how the burglars were able to quickly trawl facebook to find :
a) the street addresses of the people who were on holiday, not normally stored in facebook?
b) who did not co-habit with people who were not on holiday
c) who had stuff worth stealing
d) living within easy driving distance of the burglar
e) no alarm, neighborhood watch, alert neighbours etc
f) the exact days of leaving and arriving back
burglars already have lots of ways to find a target house without data mining social networking sites, e.g. pushing flyers half-way into letter boxes then coming back in two days to see if any are still untouched, driving buy in the evening to see if lights are off etc etc.
is it possible that some of those got burgled who had posted about their holiday, and told the police "that must be the reason" ? I know TFA asserts that the police know the gang used facebook, but something does not add up here. seems like BS to me.
I think this is another "but somehow it's different because a computer was involved!" type of issue.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
How much do you want to bet that the victims were using Facebook's default privacy settings...
My default privacy settings are the best available because I don't use Facebook.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Yeah, because that is so easy to predict.
Here's the thing, when you have kids, you end up friending a ton of people you know marginally. You also find out a lot of things that you can have talks with your kids about (not mentioning any names in those talks, just bring up the topic in general... "hey, what would you do if you found out some of your friends did such and such?").
My kids don't have Facebook accounts, but most of their IRL friends at school and church do.
But I think this shows that you shouldn't put anything online that you don't want to put right in front of your house. Don't put up a flier "gone out of town 3 weeks" on your front door and don't put it on Facebook either. Share the photos when you get back.
Sounds like a good topic for me and my family to talk about at dinner tonight.
I don't understand this fear. Anyone that knows me, or follows me for even a single day, will know I'm at work 9-5 on Monday through Friday. How does posting with my location during this time change anything?
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
So you're trashing something you don't use or understand. Nice. Very Slashdot. You and causality should suck each other off in congratulations over being too cool to use Facebook, btw.
Actually I don't use it because I understand it. Maybe you don't know this, but you can look before you leap, you can read up on something and learn something about it before deciding whether you will engage in it.
By your false logic, every non-smoker on the planet was once a smoker since they would never know why tobacco use is detrimental to health until after trying it and experiencing worse health. There's this thing called foresight that makes that unnecessary.
Incidentally "trashing" is a very strange term to describe calmly and honestly discussing its disadvantages. I think you have a sore point. Apparently the idea that others might have good reasons for not doing something that you have your reasons for doing is inflammatory and offensive to you. Most of the problems in the world are caused by an inability to live and let live, which in turn is rooted in mentalities like yours. You deserve every last bit of misery it causes you.
Dispute me on that if you think you can, though at this point the prudent thing for you would be to silently disappear and pretend you didn't notice my reply.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Funeral notices are the classic... what close family members don't go to the funeral?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I wish I had mod points to mod you up.
What many people seem to fail to see is that every single datapoint one gives out can be combined with others to often paint a far clearer picture of your life and it's details than one might think. It would actually be fairly trivial to put in a few weeks of work in order to build a list of targets ripe for the picking, if that.
It's not anywhere near as straight-forward as that. Furthermore, peer pressure is difficult even with the best parenting.
No, not displacement behavior.
Admittedly I was harsh, and overly so. I wouldn't normally say anything, but I guess not today.
The problem is, I don't see the inadequate dick thing as a joke anymore, because it's what a lot of people think, and they are serious about it. It happens on the web and in real life. I personally have been and seen other men accused of having a small pecker in casual conversation, mostly by women, when talking about traditionally masculine things like the aforementioned fast cars and firearms. I know girls that swear up and down they can tell a man's size by his car and other things like that. Most girls will tell you the same thing about a guy who has a lot of muscles. On the other hand, if I decide a girl's a slut based off her clothes, I'm an asshole even if I am right.
Even more aggravating are other men who subscribe to the same compensation rhetoric, basically selling themselves out.
Also, emasculation in general seems to be accepted by the general public as perfectly fine. If I was to liken too many shoes to insecurity of women, or something along those lines, I would be skewered. If my friends wife wears too much make up, and as a 'joke' I said she looks like a hooker, hell would break loose, and rightly so. If that same women made a 'joke' about my dick in any fashion it's not only perfectly acceptable, but I have to sit and take it, otherwise be accused of proving that she is right.
I'm not going to sit and take it anymore. From now on I am going to call people on it because it's a stereotype that needs to die. It's fucked up that men can't enjoy certain stuff without being accused of 'compensating'.
Not everything is about dicks, that's the point I was trying to make.
I have very open privacy settings. I don't trust Facebook with any degree of privacy, and with my privacy settings set to, essentially, everybody, I don't have any false sense of security. I never put anything on Facebook I don't want the whole world to see (except Mom, who isn't on line), so why restrict it anyway?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes