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Man Creates "Creepy" Stalking App
An anonymous reader writes "Creepy, a package described as a 'geolocation information aggregator,' is turning heads in privacy circles, but should people be worried? Yiannis Kakavas explains why he developed his scary stalking application. Creepy is a software package for Linux or Windows — with a Mac OS X port in the works — that aims to gather public information on a targeted individual via social networking services in order to pinpoint their location. It's remarkably efficient at its job, even in its current early form, and certainly lives up to its name when you see it in use for the first time."
Anyone instantly worried that installing this software in your own machine might also make any data on that machine available for stalking?
It somehow doesnt seem like a good idea to me to trust a programmer proficient at this kind of this without a very very thorough code review first
People, what a bunch of bastards
And you can even stalk people who don't use twitter etc.
So, the eula's take everything you post on these services (since you agreed to it), make apps to release the info (that you agreed to release) and this guy is a social phenomena for making a program to track what users freely gave up to join the sites in question?
And this is creepy?
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
If you publish your whereabouts on public streams of social networks, it is publically available. Even the biggest idiot on the internet will grasp that. Has anyone ever thought about the fact that people who check in to a location on Foursquare, post pictures of themselves at that location on Flickr and mention that location on Twitter might actually want the world to know where they are?
2. Anonymous, Wikileaks and other activists
3. Firesheep, Creepy and other social media privacy exploits
4. Botnets and other advanced commercial malware
5. Stuxnet and other government actors
.
In the 90's and early 00's it was the Frontier, where everyone gave everyone else a hand. Now, we need to start walking around with six shooters.
The amount of data breaches alone are frightening: http://www.privacyrights.org/data-breach#CP , http://www.databreaches.net/
I don't know that this really does much you can't do fairly easily already. So if you have someone's name and city, there is a good chance you can locate them. Why? All kinds of things in the public record you could look up. Own a house? Then there's a record of that publicly available. Phone numbers are normally listed (though with the increase in cell phones that is less common).
What it comes down to is that in a modern society, we are going back to how it was in older, smaller societies: You can have privacy, but you cannot have anonymity, at least not without a good deal of trouble and sacrifice.
So back in the day, with much smaller communities and so on you had an "everyone knows everyone" situation. Not literally, but people were known to a substantial part of the town. As such it was just not possible to be anonymous. Your comings and goings were noticed. Where you lived was known, that kind of thing. If you moved to a new place, again you've be noticed. Short of going and living a very solitary life, you couldn't be anonymous.
Now privacy you could have, easily. If you wanted a private conversation, just walk out in a field where nobody was within earshot. In your house you had almost complete certainty nobody could spy since there was no advanced technology. What you did you could keep private to a large degree. That you were around doing things you could not.
As things grew anonymity became more and more possible. You could just disappear in a large city, go about your business but be unknown and invisible to most everyone.
Well, that is changing back again. Technology is making it such that anonymity is going away. It is just very difficult to make yourself unknowable. Privacy is certainly possible, and the Supreme Court has ruled it is a right and thus the government is required to respect it. However anonymity is pretty hard.
So that an app can find where you live fairly easily isn't surprising at all to me. There's just a lot of public documents on you, and the Internet makes it easy to search them. The information you choose to provide on social network sites makes it even easier.
It is just kinda something we have to accept, unless we want to radically alter how society works.
Also we need to understand that anonymity and privacy are not the same thing. Too many people conflate the two. They think a right to privacy means the right to be totally unknown. Not the case. It means the right to have the specifics of your life secret, not that you are living your life a secret.
What you do in your house is your private business. That you are in your house it not private. You neighbours can watch you come home and leave, and know when you are there. That is 100% legal and ethical. You will not be anonymous. However they can't go and spy on you and see what you are doing. You can still be private.
A link to the actual site for the program: http://ilektrojohn.github.com/creepy/. Also, this program has copyright notices for 2010. So... (Though admittedly the article is dated 30 March 2011.)
Anyway, yeah, the program is written in Python it seems. And it doesn't even run for me.
Possibly because some dependencies aren't in the Ubuntu 9.10 universe. Bleh.
Anyway, I just wanted to say one other thing. I ain't worried, 'cause I don't use Social Networks! Hah! You crazy stalking types are going to have to try harder to find out about me than that. (Please help, I have no friends.)
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I'm not worried, because anyone that stalks me is bound to find out that I'm creepier than they are.
I can confirm this.
This App's rubbish. I put in Uncle Osama and the places it came up with are nowhere near where he is.
Why are people saying this is a privacy issue? It's not. It uses publicly available information that the person freely posts online for the general public to read. Its like saying articles posted in the New York Times is private information of the authors who write for it. This program dosen't even do anything cool like make HTTP requests from state / city govermently run publicly available data.
There are all ready existing applications out there that have all the features this software has and much much more.
TruePunk | Games
We're punishing the tool maker for its misuse again? Someone should warn Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This guy got it all wrong. He didn't make a creepy geolocation aggregator; he made an "advanced geolocation forensics tool for use in the intelligence community". Had he labeled it properly and been more greedy, he could be laughing all the way to the bank! He definitely could have taken a page out of the Hoglund/Barr book here.
Given the way a lot of Facebook users post anything and everything about themselves, it is not necessary to install this software to digitally stalk someone.