Foursquare: annoying, but not particularly dangerous.

The internet always needs to be a-flutter over something, and the past couple days it’s been a-flutter over how dangerous Foursquare is to its users’ unattended homes and personal belongings. In particular, the website Please Rob Me boasts a Twitter feed that offers details about where to find “all those empty homes out there.”

Foursquare, in case you’ve missed it, is a service that lets you “check in” via your mobile device to different locations about town when you go, like restaurants or museums, and it keeps track of how many times you go. You can earn different “badges,” like “Mayor of Wally’s Szechuan Castle,” if you frequent it often enough. You just have to check in each time, and your lucky followers get to see these check-ins on your Twitter feed. And they can see if you overtake someone else, or if they overtake you. It takes Twitter Minutiae (which I champion) to an extreme: not only do your followers get to learn that you like Wally’s Szechuan Castle (which is great, I enjoy the recommendation), but they get to learn that you go there all the time. So much so, in fact, that you’re now the “mayor” of the place. Great data, thanks.

And so the paranoid among the internet are now claiming that Foursquare is dangerous because each time you announce you’re visiting Wally’s (yet again), potentially millions of people can learn that your home is vacant, and ready to be ravaged. Sure, I can see the reason for some level of concern here.

But let’s think a moment. What are these Foursquare Bandits going to do? Visit Please Rob Me, and pick a guy who is sitting down to dinner. Through some unknown number of clicks after that, try to learn where the guy lives. If the house is in a convenient location for the Bandit, he can run on over there and steal all his possessions. Right? Well, what if the guy doesn’t live alone? What if his mother, sister, wife, or teenage son is home? What if he has an alarm system? What if he lives in a hellhole? What if he has large dogs? What if he just doesn’t have anything worth stealing in the dinnertime-window the Bandit has to work with?

This makes no sense to me.

A proper bandit cases a house. OK? He goes to a nice neighborhood, cases the houses on a block, learns when people are home, when the homes are vacant, which homes have the kind of loot they want. Score.

Bandits case homes and learn when people are away. They do not case people to learn when they are away from home.

So, I may not give a rat’s ass that you’ve overtaken @KungPaoLuvr as Czar of Wally’s Szechuan Castle, but I do defend your decision making skills, intelligence, and right to do so.