Monday, May 24, 2010

Location-based social Networks: Information over-sharing?


The privacy trend on the Internet has changed a lot in recent times: people used to hide their real names online a few years ago. Nowadays, they happily share with the whole world their exact location. This might lead to more risk than we might think.

Pleaserobme.com is precisely a reminder of these perils: this website publishes live tweets (many of them come from Foursquare –which has more than half million users- and networks alike), reveling people’s location. This information can be simply shared with friends or be exploited by businesses through location-based advertising. But, more intriguingly, this data could be given away to a potential burglar as well.

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