This article was originally published on the news site The Examiner.Shield Your Privacy When Going on Vacation or Robbers May PounceBy Sean Kerrigan,Tuesday, November 23, 2010 When I was 11, my family got our first answering machine. It’s embarrassing, but I was pretty excited at the time. I couldn’t wait to be the one to record our first message. As I got ready, I said to my parents, “this is easy. I’ll just say we’re out and tell callers to leave their number.” They told me I shouldn’t say we were out. Instead I should state that “we are unable to answer the phone,” because saying we were out would be an invitation to thieves scouting for easy targets. I still think this advice is pretty silly, but the principals of protecting one’s privacy has stuck with me all these years and with the dawn of the “twitter-verse” where privacy is traded for the thrills of social connectivity, this lesson takes on new importance. Now we have a new type of annual story which tends to appear just in time for the holidays. A family’s Christmas is ruined as they return from a weekend with loved ones to discover their house has been ransacked. Money, televisions, jewelry, and computers are all missing. After they deal with the initial tragedy, the family begins to wonder if a tweet indicating they were going to be gone for a while could have tipped off the crooks. To date, there have been no proven reports of enterprising burglars using twitter, but the theory is sound. The core functions of social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook encourage users to provide both short and long term locational data. Additional services like Gowilla and Foursquare can be used to log a user's location at restaurants, stores and other locations in the community. While there is no shortage of concerned mothers out there ready to scold their preteen sons and daughters about putting a photo of themselves online, websites like PleaseRobMe.com are relatively new and take a hardline approach to warning teens and adults alike about what information is readily accessible to nearly everyone. The site no longer provides information on various twitter accounts, least it be used by real burglars, but to date, it's been highly successful at gaining national attention. Site co-creator Boy Van Amstel said, “The danger is publicly telling people where you are. This is because it leaves one place you're definitely not... home.” “Most social networks have good search functionalities. Others can find them and their information as well. It's important to be aware of privacy settings, to control the reach your messages have. If you allow your messages to travel between different social networks, this becomes more complicated.” While the website that brought the phenomenon to the attention of the masses has chosen to fade away, other sites providing similar services have popped up in response. New generations of social media users are falling into the same bad habits and its worth noting that many of the default settings provide more detail than anyone should be comfortable with. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some privacy settings I need to double check. |