With all of the social networking tools available today, it is easy to get wrapped up in the fun of it all and forget about the basic rules of life. One of the biggies – Don’t announce to the world that you are not home. Unfortunately, people are happily volunteering this information (along with plenty of other personal tidbits) to the entire world without understanding the potential dangers of doing so. Social media sites/tools are making it increasingly easier for thieves to track your moves and know when you are not home. A great new site PleaseRobMe.com pokes a bit of fun at the phenomenon and aims to educate the masses by showing what NOT to do.
“Listing all those empty homes out there” is the tagline for PleaseRobMe.com and categories like “Recent Empty Homes” are used to demonstrate the dangers of location-aware services. Location-aware services is a broad term that basically means any software, device or site that allows you to share your current geographical location with others. There are a lot of advantages to sharing your location (mostly social) but users should understand the dangers associated with broadcasting your whereabouts. Mainly, telling people you are at point X means you are not at home, thus making your home a target for thieves.
A strong password, by definition, is a password that is both complex AND secure (contains numbers, letters, and special characters that do not include personal information such as name or birth date). We should all be using these types of passwords to protect ourselves from potential hackers and thieves, but the sad truth is that most of us are still taking the easy way out. These easy passwords are about as effective as NBC’s late night talk show programming strategy.
