A Burglar's Guide to the City

by Geoff Manaugh

In 2010, as social location services such as Foursquare achieved mainstream appeal, a semiautomated Twitter account called PleaseRobMe popped up. It began retweeting people’s social status updates, but only those that seemed to indicate when that person was no longer at home. “Showing you a list of all those empty homes out there” was PleaseRobMe’s tagline. Its point was not criminal, PleaseRobMe hastened to add, but sociological, showing how “oversharing,” as it’s termed, can have real-world security consequences, not the least of which is letting anyone in the world know when you’ve stepped out to a bar, a museum, a friend’s restaurant, or a nightclub—or all of the above, in a multihour bender—and thus are no longer inside your apartment. All a burglar would have to do is check their target’s Foursquare account (or Instagram or Twitter or Facebook feeds) to see how much more time they’ve got to get in and out undisturbed.