What have we done!?

Beware of how we have changed
Back in the late 1990’s, many people didn’t even use their real names on the Internet. Email addresses were usually aliases or nicknames in an attempt to retain as much privacy as possible. But with the rise in popularity of social media services such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace has also come a rise in online confidence that has proven to be anything but.
The new Internet generation doesn’t seem to have the privacy hang ups or suspicions their parents had about sharing information with strangers over the net. In fact, this younger generation of cyber savvy has an alarmingly high comfort level when it comes to communicating personal information about their lives on the Web. And it all comes down to their promiscuous affair with wing-dings, eye candy and the ease of access to whatever they want. In particular, those with smart phones such as the iPhones, Androids and the popular Blackberry.
The premise is that everyone in your social circle not only wants to know but NEEDS to know what you’re buying, where from and what for. People need to know where you are and what you are doing every minute of the day. This new social issue is called over-sharing and it is quite epidemic.
People put data up on the web and they just don’t realize the implications of this data and it is so easy to do . . .
I post my blog and it in turn, automatically updates FaceBook, Twitter and LinkedIn. It is really as simple as that. Now consider how many friends you might have, or followers or enthusiasts of your blog, their friends and friends of friends . . . not to mention the links to “share” the content.


Location Based Oversharing
It’s not just our increasingly high comfort level with a lack of online privacy, but the way people are sharing and socializing online that has changed dramatically, particularly in the past 12 months.
Services like Gowalla and FourSquare focus on location-based social networking. Using your phone or mobile Internet device, you log into these sites and announce where in the world you are and what you are doing there e.g. “Kalena is at City Fitness Gym taking a Zumba class.” The process is called *checking in.* You can check in from parks, bars, museums, restaurants, libraries or anywhere you care to create a location. The idea is to let your online friends know where you are and you earn points, badges and rewards (both tangible and intangible) based on your activity.
Sounds like harmless fun, right? But there’s a seedier side to location-based social networks. Not only does it encourage stalking by your exes, your boss and your mother, but it opens you up to the very real possibility of a criminal attack.

How is this possible?
Gowalla, FourSquare and other location-based social sites post your exact geographical location including the precise GPS co-ordinates of your current location. Some naive users of these social sites actually register their home address as a *place* and then *check in* when they arrive at the location of their homes.
If you are particularly obsessive about posting your location status on either of these sites, ANYONE with an Internet connection can track your movements at all times of the day – when you leave home, what time you arrive at work, where you decide to grab lunch, etc.
Many people also cross-link their location status updates with their Facebook and Twitter accounts, sharing their whereabouts with an ever-widening public circle. Not only could stalkers have a field day with this information, but it can make it very easy for cyber criminals and hackers to steal your identity. Unfortunately, it’s not just your identity that can be stolen.

You could be asking for it
If you are a regular user of location-based social networking sites, it’s child’s play for criminals to know when you leave your house unattended. Match this with an over-share on Twitter about your recent iPad or flat screen TV purchase and you’ve got the perfect storm for a break and enter.
To point out how simple it is for criminals to take advantage of our silly oversharing nature, programming students Frank Groeneveld, Barry Borsboom, Boy van Amstel set up a mock site: "Please Rob Me" in February this year. The site consisted of a live stream of tweets from people who were *checking in* at locations other than their Home address on FourSquare and cross-posting the information to Twitter.
The site included a location-based filter and would-be burglars were encouraged (tongue-in-cheek) to view *recent empty homes* and *new opportunities.*
When asked why they built such a site, Groeneveld, Orsboom and van Amstel responded:

“These new technologies make it increasingly easy to share potentially sensitive personal information, like your exact location. The danger is publicly telling people where you are. This is because it leaves one place you’re definitely not…home. So here we are; on one end we’re leaving lights on when we’re going on a holiday, and on the other we’re telling everybody on the internet we’re not home…”
“Our intention is not, and never has been, to have people burgled… The goal of the website is to raise some awareness on this issue and have people think about how they use services like Foursquare, Gowalla, BrightKite, Twitter, Google Buzz etc. Anybody and everybody can get this information.”

Just how Easy Is It?
You can find out how vulnerable you are by using your location-based social networks. Simply willingly published your photos and home co-ordinates as public *places* on Foursquare or Facebook “Places”. Alternatively, look up a friend that may be using them, enter the information submitted by them into such applications as Google Earth, Bing Maps, etc., or use the resources of your super nifty GPS enabled devices, and go visit them at their homes or present location, and share with them all the information you have learned about them online, like the fact they had been out for dinner 14 times in the past month and enjoyed listening to the band Pet Shop Boys.

Photo Tracking
Did you know that you may be sharing your location even if you don’t use location-based social sites? Photos you take with smart phones and upload to the web are automatically embedded with GPS tracking data that can easily be deciphered to provide precise location co-ordinates. And anyone with photo decoding software can do it, not to mention, anyone coming across the photo on the Web could track your physical location down and become a nightmare come true.

What I think
Whether you think it’s harmless or not, the data people are willing to share online is increasing every day. Use a little bit more due diligence and consider the implications of your actions. In context, much like fame, fortune and popularity, social networking is inherently risky. One must consider if it was all worth it if they came home one day, only to find their most valued possessions are gone, or a loved one was hurt on account of excessive access on your part . . . So, what do I think? It shouldn't matter what I think. In fact, now that you had read this blog, the real question should be "What do I think".

Until next time . . .