It's an interesting idea, tracking people's current locations based on their sharing on social networks, and cross-referencing other databases to find out if someone is at home.
But this seems like a very high-threshold way to find out whether someone is home. I mean, if I'm really interested in robbing someone, am I really going to go through the trouble of searching through social networks, cross-referencing information from people in my area, and only then starting to figure out which homes are (and aren't) worth robbing?
And of course, there are a number of very important variables that such an analysis ignores: Whether the person lives alone (or is renting the place out via AirBNB), whether they're in a building or single home, whether there is a burglar alarm, how good the police force is in that city, how easy it is to get into (and out of) the home in question, and whether there's anything worth stealing.
So it's an interesting experiment, but telling people to remove their names and geographical information from Instagram to avoid being robbed strikes me as a bit far fetched.
I run an e-mail list for people who live in my city (Modi'in, Israel), and we now have nearly 3,000 subscribers. People are constantly saying, "I'm going to be away on vacation during such-and-such a period of time. Does anyone need a short-term rental?" That strikes me as a far greater invitation to mischief and robbery than Instagram or any other social network.
You may not do this for say, robbing joe blogs. But what happens if your going to rob a celeb who has 50k+ of jewlery in their house and you know they're going to be out of town filming for three weeks, or that they are doing a PR night so you have 8 hours before they return.
There are examples of this, popularized by the movie The Bling Ring[1].
> But this seems like a very high-threshold way to find out whether someone is home. I mean, if I'm really interested in robbing someone, am I really going to go through the trouble of searching through social networks, cross-referencing information from people in my area, and only then starting to figure out which homes are (and aren't) worth robbing?
If you are a professional robber, you might. This is something that scales well; you write it once and then you just sit and watch how the list of potential targets generates itself.
Actually, I wouldn't be surprised to find such thing available as a service somewhere in the Deep Web. Hell, if one doesn't care about morality or law, then this is one of the best SaaS opportunities I have ever seen.
But (morality issues aside), I don't think the "customers" have a need... it's so easy to find an undefended house.
I guess they would be better served by knowing which houses have a burglar alarm, and at least in my country, homeowners themselves provide that information (by putting a visible sign outside the house that basically says "don't rob me, rob my neighbour").
For a single robber it may be a bit far fetched, but sooner or later a tech savvy one will realize he can provide this as a service to other robbers to reduce his personal risk and scale up revenue.
I think PDRM is a great initiative and hopefully it will become widely popular.
Which means, based on your argument, that unless you're on someone's radar as living in a rich neighborhood and/or having lots to steal, this doesn't really apply to you. No?
But this seems like a very high-threshold way to find out whether someone is home. I mean, if I'm really interested in robbing someone, am I really going to go through the trouble of searching through social networks, cross-referencing information from people in my area, and only then starting to figure out which homes are (and aren't) worth robbing?
And of course, there are a number of very important variables that such an analysis ignores: Whether the person lives alone (or is renting the place out via AirBNB), whether they're in a building or single home, whether there is a burglar alarm, how good the police force is in that city, how easy it is to get into (and out of) the home in question, and whether there's anything worth stealing.
So it's an interesting experiment, but telling people to remove their names and geographical information from Instagram to avoid being robbed strikes me as a bit far fetched.
I run an e-mail list for people who live in my city (Modi'in, Israel), and we now have nearly 3,000 subscribers. People are constantly saying, "I'm going to be away on vacation during such-and-such a period of time. Does anyone need a short-term rental?" That strikes me as a far greater invitation to mischief and robbery than Instagram or any other social network.