503 – Social networking: don’t put everything on show

WE are all – or at least most of us – avid users of social networking. Given how much time my daughter devotes to Facebook, I suspect it will have even greater relevance to the next generation.

But whether your network of choice is Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Flikr or YouTube, social networking is about sharing common interests, letting other people know what’s going on.

But I came across an interesting piece of information – a warning – about putting too much information on social networks.

Now, I know there are plenty of horror stories of houses being trashed after a teen’s birthday party location and date was broadcast to the whole of the Facebook network, but what I’m talking about is more relevant to business owners and their cars: it’s cybercasing.

Posting pictures of you and your newest car – along with details of when you are going to be away – can be the very stuff that signposts to organised car thieves that your car is fair game. And they know exactly where it is.

It’s all thanks to automatic geotagging of photographs, which embed the longitude and latitude at which they were taken – particularly on the latest smart phone devices.

Geotagging pinpoints the location of your vehicle, which is then easy to find through Googlemaps or MultiMap.

Geotagging was brought to the world’s attention by researchers at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) who recently published a report explaining the technology and how it can be used to uncover people and possessions.