BUZZ NEWS

’Please Don’t Rob Me’ Gives Socnet-Stalking Robbers Pause

Posted on February 22, 2010
Angela Natividad

You’ve probably heard of Please Rob Me, a tongue-in-cheek site that aggregates the tweets of people who use Twitter to share their real-time locations on FourSquare.

The object of Please Rob Me is to illustrate how stupid, even dangerous, it is to broadcast your whereabouts constantly to an eager public. Not everyone on Twitter is a nice guy, and now all those potentially not-nice-guys know:

when you’re not home
what your favorite grocery store is
what bar you like to hit on lonely Thursday nights
when you’re on vacation

That’s an awful lot of data to share with anybody who ever deigns to follow you. Digitally or literally.

Anywho, Len Kendall, developer of The3six5 Project, is hoping to catch the wave of press buoying Please Rob Me with his own creation: Please DON’T Rob Me.

Avid and unapologetic FourSquare/GoWalla/Yelp users are encouraged to tweet reasons why robbers shouldn’t target them. "For inspiration, check out the massively successful 1990 film, Home Alone," the site mischievously suggests.

Rules are simple: instead of aggregating the tweets of people that have left home, Please Don’t Rob Me aggregates any tweet that includes "Don’t Rob Me," "someone robbed me," "I own a gun" or "i set a trap." Curiously, and use (or non-use) of FourSquare aside, there’s a bamboozling number of people that claim to have done the latter:

"So I set a trap n my room 2 c if u really sneak n there wen im gone...u got caught.& now u mad at me? stay the hell out my room!!!"

Well, I guess I can see why you’d rather turn your abode into an elaborate death chamber instead of switching the publish-to-Twitter feature off on your FourSquare app. Oh, wait. No, I can’t.