The internet is a place to communicate. Some people like to talk to their friends, family, relatives, followers, distant friends and other people in their community. But some people publish any information about anything: whether it’s about what they are doing or what they’re thinking. Some “news” really don’t matter at all: nobody wanted to know they are on the toilet, yet.

Now a simple service from the Netherlands came up on the internet: PleaseRobMe.com. PleaseRobMe only combines two information streams: Twitter.com and the internet game, often used be Twitter users, Foursquare. Foursquare provides infos about the location of the user and via Twitter you can see what they’re doing right now (1). This goes out to all the Twitter-oholics out there can’t stand to shout they’re all-day doings. But some of these are a little more interesting than though: talking about entering the taxi to get one’s flight is a very dangerous. Burglars can use these information to rob the flat.

Often the Twitter-users send a lot of information all day – most of them are trivial. But if one’s just sending in a rush, and may not thin about these “news”, one cannot detect whether this information is more secret than though or not. So this behaviour it-self is responsible for the secrets published, not the user him-self – he lost his locus of control a few days, weeks, months ago. And a research found out that over more than 77 % of all information on the internet about a person are true – if they’re not provided by somebody else. They found out that (only) 23% ever did made a false statement about themselves on the web 2.0 (1). Combined with the amount of data on the net you can say that one can find out a lot about people and their behaviour.

Another study assumed that the use of profiles from mobile phones can be used to determine and predict your behaviour now and in the future. They tested it and it was correct: in up to 93% of the cases. Most people spend their time in a few places. It’s easy to predict and observe your behaviour. It does even not varie between women, men, age, living area or ethnical groups (2). So it’s easy for robbers to evalutate an easy target when there’s a late status update via iPhone app: taking plane to…

If you’re about to board your plane to go on a flight and just check your mailbox and twitter a news before you’re “left stranded” – without the internet. So anybody knows you’re a longer time away. Now your Facebook, Twitter or any other social network may provide information about your home: where it’s at, are you living in a relation ship, what job do you have. Now anybody may know: what kind of travel is it, is there anybody home, is he or she rich and where to go to?

Five years ago anybody told you not to use your full, real life name on the net. Now we’re a lot farther and we may not reached the top: there are even more people getting access to the internet in the comming years. Without loss of generality older people and people of any age in the third world countries are about to get access to the internet. And people are about to use more than earlier the internet: mobile phones and netbooks making the internet ubiquitous.

So take care what kind of information you provide on the internet and don’t let anybody anything know. It’s far better only to talk to friends. But not to all the 461.395 are worth knowing that!

Sources:
(1) Spiegel Online
(2) heise Telepolis