Rob, Rob me do!

As you may know, one of the areas of technology we monitor is online Location Based Services, and one of our hypotheses is that people are massively under-estimating the downsides of these services. For example, the recent Google Buzz service was launched complete with a back door into people's locations that was easily hackable.

Anyway, one of the more obvious applications of Location Based Dis-Service is typified by PleaseRobMe.com, a service that take your utterances on various LBS systems about where you are and aggregates them (see the graphic above).

Bit of fun, you may say, where 's the harm in that. I can already see harrumphing from those who are upset about all those people who didn't like Buzz's privacy issues - such as Louis Gray, who said:

Amidst the din of the pack clustering around the body of Buzz, kicking at it like a group of children at a 6-year-olds' youth soccer match striking at a ball, some folks have seen beyond the tin foil hat nonsense and told people to look forward to something new.

What would you say if I told you that I have seen beyond the Tin Foil Hat and seen something new? Oh yes, I took one of the people on the first PleaseRobMe screen I looked at (its not one of the people in the graphic above by the way), and found their home address via a quick use of Twitter and Google. Took 5 minutes or so (the person was about the 10th I tried). You could fairly quickly build some algorithms to automate that mashup process

So when Louis says that people who worry about social network privacy are:

....the shrill minority [that] has taken its pound of flesh, as Google's momentum with Buzz has taken body blow after body blow, primarily from an older generation of tech bloggers and business journalists unwilling or undesiring to embrace today's world of active sharing and aggregation.

All I would say in response to these arguments is, are you not therefore advocating "Please Rob Me" type services in this race to active sharing and aggregation?

And for whom

(Update - I am told Twitter has disabled PleaseRobMe, but that is irrelevant - this stuff is easy to get)