Facebook updates can give house thieves the break they need

Thieves following Facebook holiday updates can have your home address in 60 seconds.

Travel Insurance News - 21/04/2011

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Social networking sites like Facebook are hugely popular, especially as a handy way to keep friends abreast of your latest holiday experiences. Unfortunately, savvy thieves with some technological know-how can use the updates to determine not only the likelihood that you’re not at home but to find out where you live – in as little as 60 seconds.

The security issue potentially afflicts anybody using Facebook and Twitter – the two most popular social networking platforms today. Other less popular sites offer little, if any, protection, however.

This sobering conclusion is the work of a team of researchers. The researchers studied messages like ‘packing my cases’ and ‘just landed’. By cross-referencing the posts against other information easily found online, such as family names, children’s schools and address databases, researchers were able to determine the exact location of people’s homes, and do so in remarkably little time.

Holidaymakers are at the greatest risk as posting from abroad tells thieves that your home is likely to be empty. The study was run jointly by Co-operative Insurance and Co-operative Travel.

The shocking revelation comes hot on the heels of a recent expose in which researchers demonstrated how modern smartphones with built-in GPS could reveal not just a child’s home address but the exact location of the child’s bedroom. Unless users are careful to disable the GPS (global positioning system) functionality, pictures they upload to social networks and online image sharing sites can easily include the co-ordinates of where they were when they took the photograh.

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