Official News page 9

REAL LIFE NEWS: TWITTER ATTRACTS BURGLARS

by Hazed

If you use Twitter, or Facebook, or MySpace, or any other social network to keep your friends informed of your oh-so-exciting life, you could be opening yourself up to criminals. That's what happened to Mr and Mrs Hyman, who used Twitter recently to share the details of the trip they embarked on. Their posts said they were "preparing to head out of town," that they had "another 10 hours of driving ahead," and that they "made it to Kansas City.

Unfortunately, those Twitter updates tipped off crooks that they were away, and their house was burgled. At least, that's what Israel Hyman thinks. He runs an online video business and has 2,000 followers on Twitter. "They didn't take any of our normal consumer electronics," he said - they took his video equipment instead.

It's not uncommon for those who post frequent Twitter messages to tell followers when they are away from home. Clearly they haven't thought about the consequences - they wouldn't leave a message on the answerphone saying "I'm away for a week," and people are also starting to be more careful with their email "Out of the office" auto-replies not to include information about business trips or holidays that would tip of wannabe burglars.

But Facebook, Twitter and so on are relatively new services so the implications haven't been explored properly yet.

Given how easy it is to take somebody's online identity and find out exactly where they live, with Google maps helpfully showing you the route to take to get to their house, anyone with less than pure intentions is going to find it easy to react to your "I'm having a wonderful holiday" message in a way you wouldn't be happy about.

Let this be a warning!

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