Geotagging your Tweets

This is certainly an interesting feature, but I find that for the uninformed user, this is incredibly dangerous and they might not even know they should be weary.

Why You Should Be Weary

Sharing information, and finding people near you is great if you have the right intentions but some people out there are wack jobs and others are just smart enough to use the information to rob you. Here is the video explaining this robbery:

This happened WITHOUT geotagging. However, now that geotagging has come along, someone could tell that you are not at home by looking at the location of your tweet, no matter what you are saying. Granted, this is an opt-in service, but people still try the latest and greatest just for a “why not”. Here is a picture of the Twitter settings that allow you to turn on Geotagging:

Notice there is a button to “Delete all location data”.  I don’t remember seeing this before, but I have a feeling if it wasn’t there, it would heavily requested by people who get freaked out about what geotagging really means.

Microsoft’s Bing Maps now supports searching for geotagged tweets in a given area and is quite neat.  I wrote some test code today and ran it on one of the users that came up.  It showed me that they tweeted at what looked like home, and at school, and both of those tweets had timestamps.  With this sort of information, trends about how a person spends their day could be developed, and more robberies like the one mentioned above could happen.

Who would want to use Geotagging for their personal tweets?  Are you worried?

Larry Johnson, who played for the Kansas City Chiefs was released earlier this month as a free agent after bashing the coaching staff and disrespecting a fan on his Twitter account. This action to release Johnson was strongly encouraged by fans as more than 32,000 signed an online petition for his release from the team.