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The first online-only news site in state history to get media credentials to cover the state capitol and Seattle city hall, PubliCola has been called a “must-read” by the Seattle Post Intelligencer and a hot “New Media Mover and Shaker” by Seattle Magazine—which also cited our own Erica C. Barnett as the city's No. 1 news nerd.

Hello, World, I’m Not at Home

News   February 17, 2010 at 11:02 am Glenn Fleishman

My Effacebook column yesterday had a few comments that indicated that I was being a little oversensitive about what I’d revealed to Facebook, given how much other data gets revealed. Which is why I have to revel in the sheer irony of Please Rob Me.

The site uses the public Twitter feed, a massive firehose of status updates, to pull out any tweet created from the Four Square service that people use to announce their current location. (Personally, it creeps me out to leave bread crumbs about my whereabouts all over the place.)

If you’re at a location that you tweeted via Four Square, you are ipso facto not at home. Twitter enabled a Geotagging API months ago, which is a way for developers of third-party Twitter software to grab the coordinates on a mobile device from a GPS receiver or Wi-Fi positioning service and attach that to a Tweet.

Thus, if you Tweet a lot, have location turned on in your Twitter account, and use mobile software with that feature enabled, it would be very easily to pull up where someone lives, and when they are not at home.

(Yet another privacy/security flaw in Google Buzz reveals your location in some circumstances when a browser encounters a malicious URL.)

For instance, this friend in Ithaca has unwarily revealed his location to be in a college campus building. Off to the airport, to steal toilet paper from his home.

Showing where someone is via geotagging in a Twitter mobile app.

Twitter can expose (with your permission) where you are.


  • giffy

    Or, you know, someone could just look to see if my car was in the driveway, knock on the door pretending to be selling something, wait for me to leave, look in a window, notice if my mail had been picked up, figure I am probably at work during the day, or any other of a hundred easier ways to see if I am not home then to figure out my name, my twitter ID, and go that route.

    I suppose if I had someone out to get me personally this would be a concern, but then it seems pretty easy not to use such services.

    Look if you are really concerned about companies knowing shit about you then its time to cut up the credit and debit cards, turn off voicemail, not use the internet or email, never sign up for grocery cards, magazines, or anything delivered to your house.

  • http://twitter.com/GlennF GlennF

    Are you stalking me?

  • giffy

    That would require using twitter and that is a low to which I will not sink. ;)

  • http://twitter.com/GlennF GlennF

    I award you both ears and the tail for that excellent remark.