www.pleaserobme.com demonstrates just how uncritical many social media users really are
Just came across this story on BBC website about a Dutch youngster who built a site that uses Twitter information about peoples’ locations to pintpoint empty homes.
The site’s makers say that they did it to make the point that anyone with half a brain can misuse the kind of personal information that people readily give for free every time they create content or sign up for a new ‘app’ in a social networking site.
A little research shows that it’s in fact a viral bit of buzz created by a company called ‘For the Hack’. A quick check shows it’s not really pin-pointing anyone’s home, rather just pulling together tweets from people who are sharing their geo-location data on Twitter.
It appears to be just a clever viral trick to get some big Adsense Revenue.
But that aside, I think it’s a point well made. Uncritically sharing your location (a thing that the iPhone and other GPS enabled mobiles do really well) has all kinds of worrying implications as these guys are pointing out. And, BBC, uncritically swallowing it shows just how little you understand or research your stories.
Mind you, the potential for ‘triangulating’ the information that people put out on social media is frankly, scary. It seems that very few people really ‘get’ the idea of the bigger picture that their content and their personal information together creates. Sadly, as my posts about those ‘end-to-end’ direct mail marketing companies (currently making millions of pounds from premium ‘prize draw’ phone lines) show, this leaves them ripe for ripping off.
The same applies when it comes to online reputation. People often obsess about a single piece of information they think is damaging that someone else has said about them and by doing that, miss the bigger picture. In the bigger picture, it’s much more about the overall impression that someone gets of you. From that perspective what you say and do (and what you don’t say and do) play a far bigger part than what any one other person says or does.
Well done, Boy Van Amstel. I hope you make a pile wiz all your lovely advertising revenues. 
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