12.28 am, Tuesday February 14 2012

Aussies at risk on 'Please Rob Me' website

13:00 AEDT Thu Feb 18 2010
By Henri Paget, ninemsn
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Australians are making life easier for thieves by posting information online that reveals when their homes are empty.

A new website, PleaseRobMe.com, aggregates Twitter location posts and lists potential targets based on their location.

A search of the site reveals dozens of "opportunities" from most major cities in Australia.

Raz Chorev, a freelance marketing consultant in Sydney, was listed on the site after he posted a message on Twitter saying he was at a cafe in Darlinghurst.

Mr Chorev told ninemsn he was surprised to learn he had been listed as a potential target but he was not concerned enough to change his online habits.

"If someone really wants to rob me they'll do it without Twitter," he said.

The founders of PleaseRobMe.com, which is based in the Netherlands, claim to have built the site to raise awareness of the dangers of posting your location online.

"The danger is publicly telling people where you are," a message on the site reads.

"This is because it leaves one place you're definitely not ... home.

"So here we are; on one end we're leaving lights on when we're going on a holiday, and on the other we're telling everybody on the internet we're not home."

Mobile applications like Foursquare allow users to quickly post their location online, giving their friends the opportunity to find them or post responses to their location.

But the messages are available to everyone, a system PleaseRobMe.com describes as "potentially pretty dangerous".

"The goal of this website is to raise some awareness on this issue and have people think about how they use services like Foursquare, Brightkite, Google Buzz etc," the site explains.

"Our intention is not, and never has been, to have people burglarised."

 
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