Thursday 18 February 2010

Will you tell your enemies where you are?

In the current society where everyone has a 3G mobile, a Facebook account, twitter username and more, sometimes we forgot about our privacy.

These days is becoming very popular the Foursquare web site. It's a very simple social game where you can tell your friends where you are. This is a nice way to meet new sites and catch your friends whatever they are. Foursquare also offers badges for different actions to incentive people to use their application. It also send tweets using our Twitter account telling our friends where are we if we configure it. It's funny!

But this can be a very high risk for our privacy. If our twitter account is public anyone can know at any time where we are. This principle is the one behind the Please Rob Me web page. They use a simple search on Twitter, 4sq -@foursquare, which returns all the automatic generate tweets from the Foursquare web site. These tweets are send when we check-in in a place. People telling everyone where they are? Scary... But wait! It's another web page that offers the same service. It is Gowalla and, again, we can know where is the people who is using this web site: gowal.la -@Gowalla

Right now it is more funny than dangerous but the important point behind this web page is that in the actual society the people give away their privacy. Some years ago (not too much, only 2 or 3...) our personal data was the most important thing for ourselves but nowadays we don't really care about it. We publicity everywhere where we are, what are we doing and, sometimes, pictures or videos.

Our recommendation is to keep your data the more private the applications allow you and try to think twice before posting any data (text, image or video) at Internet. Once posted sometimes is difficult to delete it...

Oh, by the way... I have a public twitter account! You can follow me at @p_laguna for all my security related tweets.

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