Yep, the premise of this is pretty ridiculous. Out of 80k they only identified 2700 homes. How many of those are actually within a reachable distance and how can you be sure those people also live alone. I'd bet a large percentage of users posting on Instagram probably also live with their parents and therefore there's a chance the house won't be empty.
So what are you left with? A few hundred? That's assuming the average burglar would even bother to do any of this as opposed to just staking out a house for a few hours with poor security.
An old trick I've heard is to have someone call the house's landline while you are robbing it. As long as the phone is ringing, you can be reasonably sure that no one is home.
A lot of families, including my own, will not answer the phone if they're asleep or busy. Or more commonly, if the caller is not recognized on caller ID they'll just let it ring.
If you call the same number 10 times in a row, or let it ring for minutes, you can be reasonably sure nobody is home. Most people would at least get pissed and pick the phone up, if only to slam it back down.
> If you call the same number 10 times in a row, or let it ring for minutes, you can be reasonably sure nobody is home.
If it has an automatic answering system, you can't "let it ring for minutes", and if it has the ringer turned off (and there are lots of people who, with an answering, do this by default) then it won't even ring at all (though you'll think it is ringing.)
I'm not sure about over there, but here in the US I feel most of the remaining landlines are used by the elderly, which just so happen to be the desired targets of many robbers.
Agree that it's silly. At best it gives you positive data about places where people are. It says nothing about the state of the places where they are not, except that they are not in those places. Just because one of those places happens to be the one they live in doesn't make it fit for a quick burglary.
Locally we had a huge problem with door to door salesmen who would case the place out. They walk around suburban residential neighborhoods at noon on a weekday when probably half the houses are empty, maybe with a ladder as a prop, hard hats, clipboards, etc. If no one answers the door 3 times at 1:30pm on a Tuesday, then on the fourth time they pull up in a truck, break the back door, clean the place out, drive to the next house, etc.
They also went around on trash day recording on their map who was throwing out giant cardboard boxes formerly containing large screen TVs, but those are now getting so cheap and so uncomfortably large that they're not so much of a target anymore. My 42 inch would have sold for several thousand maybe a decade ago, but now its just a couple hundred bucks, why even bother, compared to grabbing some laptops or jewelry.
That would be incredible commitment if they came back three times to guess at schedules.
Most home robberies are of the kick the door in, grab the obvious valuables in literally seconds, and get out and away variety. The door-to-door ruse is a perfect filter that there probably isn't a person or a big dog behind the door.
Door-to-door campaigns have always been an enormous nuisance, but in light of their use by criminals (well, more obvious criminals), it really needs to be prohibited.
I use to work on a system that monitored when customers were going to be away on vacation.
If you also had data on whether or not they had an alarm system then that could be a very dangerous combination.
I would never rob anyone though, risk too high, reward too low, and I'd feel bad.
Plus, where I live most people own a gun, it would not be wise to break down my door. Yes, I put a gun in the bathroom when I shower and poop.
One of my biggest fears is being asleep and having sleep paralysis and not being able to defend myself at night. Although I'm not sure if I'm just dreaming that I have sleep paralysis or not, I strongly suspect I am but it's hard to test.
I agree, this would most likely only pose much of a thread to people like celebrities, where the potential gain is very high.
For the average person it's much more likely that the burglar is just using opportunity. For example they saw you leave shortly before 9:00 or your house just happens to look empty during the day.
That's by no means to say that this project is a bad idea. I think anything that attempts to teach people to be more careful about the information they put out there in public online is absolutely a good idea as this kind of information could be used for purposes other than burglary.
Steel toe-caps, a hi-visibility jacket and some emulsion-spattered trousers will allow one to get away with pretty much anything, even in the broadest of broad daylight.
We once cut the lock on a friend's very nice bike (she lost the key) using an angle grinder and a miniature generator, in the middle of the high street in the middle of the afternoon, and nobody batted an eyelid. We were dressed in normal clothes. TBF we probably got away with that because it was so blatant. Still, it's amazing what people will ignore. Bystander effect and all that.
> We once cut the lock on a friend's very nice bike (she lost the key) using an angle grinder and a miniature generator, in the middle of the high street in the middle of the afternoon, and nobody batted an eyelid.
What should have they done?
Call the police? What would the police do? Question you? Ask about your identities? How would they identify your friend as the owner of the bike?
Since moving to Toronto I've witnessed three people trying to smash locks in street. I stopped them all and asked "Should I believe you should be doing that?"
Two of them said they owned the bike and gave some plausible explanation and way to back it up, and were prepared for me to check. They both thanked me for asking.
The third one told me to fuck off, and ran away.
Certainly the first two could have been thieves, I'll never know.
Props for trying. I would like to think I would do the same in such a scenario but it does seem like a personal safety risk. Although I'd hope to not get shot over a bike, there are people who have been shot over shoes before.
Well, nice bikes are commonly engraved with postcodes here, so that would be something. I'd have expected for some people to at least stare at us or something, but it was like people were trying their best to ignore us, like we had the Somebody Else's Problem field from hhgg, which I suppose we did.
I suppose that's my point really: most of "security" is just the social contract in action. The reason you don't get robbed is because nobody wants to rob you.
Same experience. Nobody even questioned why I was trying to break into a car with a coat hanger at the gas station. Maybe the attendants inside saw me get out of it but one guy actually stopped and tried to help get it open (he admitted he had less experience than me at it). It was at least half an hour on one of our main streets.
Many years ago a friend was arrested for tampering with ATMs, at the jail they told him it was his fault because he was doing it late in the night. According to the crime scholars there, everything you do late at night is suspicious and likely to get police attention. Indeed, he was arrested when he was leaving the ATM and the officer spotted the packs of bills on his jacket in a routine frisk (in Brazil an officer can make arbitrary pat downs).
It might be easier to burgle a house during the day, when the target and the neighbours are more likely to be at work. Anecdotally, my house was burgled around 3pm and my friends was also burgled whilst at work.
Most robberies happen during the day when people are in work and streets are noisy. Attempting to rob city house in night sounds like even more stupid thing then daytime robbery.
There are valid scenarios for robbing during the night - for example in many holiday destinations with villas, holiday apartments etc. it is expected that when there are people inside the house, there is also cash money, laptops, tablets, smart phones and other small easily carriable items with value worth the effort available.
It's an interesting idea, tracking people's current locations based on their sharing on social networks, and cross-referencing other databases to find out if someone is at home.
But this seems like a very high-threshold way to find out whether someone is home. I mean, if I'm really interested in robbing someone, am I really going to go through the trouble of searching through social networks, cross-referencing information from people in my area, and only then starting to figure out which homes are (and aren't) worth robbing?
And of course, there are a number of very important variables that such an analysis ignores: Whether the person lives alone (or is renting the place out via AirBNB), whether they're in a building or single home, whether there is a burglar alarm, how good the police force is in that city, how easy it is to get into (and out of) the home in question, and whether there's anything worth stealing.
So it's an interesting experiment, but telling people to remove their names and geographical information from Instagram to avoid being robbed strikes me as a bit far fetched.
I run an e-mail list for people who live in my city (Modi'in, Israel), and we now have nearly 3,000 subscribers. People are constantly saying, "I'm going to be away on vacation during such-and-such a period of time. Does anyone need a short-term rental?" That strikes me as a far greater invitation to mischief and robbery than Instagram or any other social network.
You may not do this for say, robbing joe blogs. But what happens if your going to rob a celeb who has 50k+ of jewlery in their house and you know they're going to be out of town filming for three weeks, or that they are doing a PR night so you have 8 hours before they return.
There are examples of this, popularized by the movie The Bling Ring[1].
> But this seems like a very high-threshold way to find out whether someone is home. I mean, if I'm really interested in robbing someone, am I really going to go through the trouble of searching through social networks, cross-referencing information from people in my area, and only then starting to figure out which homes are (and aren't) worth robbing?
If you are a professional robber, you might. This is something that scales well; you write it once and then you just sit and watch how the list of potential targets generates itself.
Actually, I wouldn't be surprised to find such thing available as a service somewhere in the Deep Web. Hell, if one doesn't care about morality or law, then this is one of the best SaaS opportunities I have ever seen.
But (morality issues aside), I don't think the "customers" have a need... it's so easy to find an undefended house.
I guess they would be better served by knowing which houses have a burglar alarm, and at least in my country, homeowners themselves provide that information (by putting a visible sign outside the house that basically says "don't rob me, rob my neighbour").
For a single robber it may be a bit far fetched, but sooner or later a tech savvy one will realize he can provide this as a service to other robbers to reduce his personal risk and scale up revenue.
I think PDRM is a great initiative and hopefully it will become widely popular.
Which means, based on your argument, that unless you're on someone's radar as living in a rich neighborhood and/or having lots to steal, this doesn't really apply to you. No?
Mine home address is available to anybody from local yellow pages too.
Privacy is indeed important, but fear of robberies is not the reason why we should protect it. Nor is someones home address the supersecret info I desperately need to protect. There were maybe two facebook post triggered robberies worldwide. It is much easier to rob one of hundreds seemingly right now empty houses robber goes around every day then to analyze pictures and maps to find one random target.
You might be surprised by the robbers' creativity and drive. For example, you can't put anymore the time and day of a wake in the local newspapers, since burglars used this info to break into the houses of the dead's relatives. Same thing for weddings.
The whole point of it is kind of moot though, an impulse burglar would just roam the neighbourhood to find a target and one with a specific target has better ways of finding out if the house is empty than 1 inhabitant posting to instagram... Not being at home is not what elicits criminal behaviour.
Doesn't seem very indicative of a good place to rob to me. If I'm not home, my wife usually is, and if we're not, the landlord also lives in the house, not to mention the dogs. The only things I own worth stealing are my computers anyway and those are all portable and stuffed in a backpack every weekday, locked in a hotel weekday nights, and often with me off at a hackathon on weekends. So if I'm taking a picture away from my house, most of the time the only thing I own worth anything is with me. If I was a robber I'd rather case houses in person.
Reponsible behaviour would be informing just the owner of the photograph that they are potentially making themselves vulnerable.
Sharing the information with the internet at large is just being irresponsible in order to try and show off, no matter how many disclaimers are on the site.
"PDRM is meant to demonstrate how easy it is to find out where someone lives and if they are at home or not. The aim of this site is to educate and empower people to protect themselves better while using social media."
The target audience of a website like this is us on HN, not the people who need to receive the message about privacy.
The two groups aren't mutually exclusive. It never ceases to amaze me how many people with a deep understanding of technology still seem to over-share in this regard.
I think it's far more interesting and productive to use facebook posts for this, rather than GPS coordinates in EXIF data and comparing it with a phone book (which is essentially what they're doing, according to the about page). Facebook posts often contain much more information and that information is easier to extract.
Realistically speaking, neither of these cases will be addressed. Although properly using the privacy settings can help, the entire reason people use tools like these is to express themselves about things they're seeing, and that usually doesn't happen at home. This coupled with the fact that the risk is extremely low, and that there are much better ways for a burglar to obtain this information, I don't think this is the best way to go about privacy awareness. It was probably fun to build, though.
Why on earth is that site made primarily for touch controls? Am I the only one who finds these sliding (vertically or horizontally, doesn't matter) sites with tons of empty space and huge fonts extreme impractical or even obnoxious?
You want to find my specific kid for nefarious purposes or rob my specific house, modern technology makes that about a billion times easier than decades ago.
You want to find a kid for nefarious purposes or rob a house, any moron can find the nearest elementary school or drive around a subdivision watching cars pull out in the morning and swing back in 5 minutes and technology doesn't help very much at all. If anything technology makes it worse, too easy for nosy neighbor with an omnipresent cellphone to make a call.
So it's being marketed as technology makes it easier for a random scary dude to go after a random victim, but in reality the problem is crazy addicted coworker, crazy ex, crazy relative, not just random scary dude.
As an aside, it is official UK policy to NOT respond to reports of someone's house alarm going off. If you ring 999 they'll ask you if you can actually see someone in the house robbing things and if you can't, they won't send anyone out.
The reason is that too many house alarms go off by accident, they don't have the manpower to check them all.
Yep, I was just going to say. Right when I moved into a new apartment, I didn’t know the security code to the alarm so it went off for a good 20 minutes. You could hear the alarm on the street, but no one seemed to care or pay too much attention to it. It reminded me of this http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/opinion/bike-thief.html
Anyone can rob your house/most apartments if they look like
Construction workers/Landscapers.
Hide your jewelry where no one will find it; you might need to know a little bit about construction though.
In the end, make sure you have an ip cam that captures license plates, and a few in your house.
A smart criminal will have flip up plates, and wear desguises though.
Maybe that jewelry should go into a safe dep. box? Make sure you
have no active judgements though? They can snatch it all
up. They can also empty out your bank account. Be proactive, and don't give them a cent. Become Judgement Proof--if you have any one you trust your life with?
Burying in the backyard is not a bad idea, but don't do it
drunk. I know a guy who lost $800,000 in Muir Beach after
a night of hard partying. He woke up and couldn't find
remember what he did with his ill gotten money, or maybe
that's just what he told his wife?
It should (and the the previous PleaseRobMe.com also made this mistake) use the word "burglary" rather than "robbery". Edits - this could just be a British difference rather than a US one, if so, my bad!
Robbery is about theft (usually using force) from a person, whereas burglary is unlawful entry to and theft from that person's property. Since the person is not going to be there, the property is empty and ripe for burglary.
A more interesting and challenging PleaseDontRobMe would focus on where the target is, away from home securities, who they are with, the security situation of the country, the best escape routes relative to their location, locations of police, CCTVs etc. Much more interesting geographically in my opinion!
This is not just a British difference. Robbery always involves some form of threat or assault in the US, legally speaking. And colloquially speaking too, except in recent years where the word has lost some meaning.
IMO, the how to protect yourself should be more prominent and perhaps on the first slide/page.
I stopped using Instagram because I couldn't keep up with me post-dating my activities. It was more of a chore to remember to post a week or so later and 'pretend' I'm doing such activity now, instead I just didn't bother sharing.
I got a brand new car a few months back, and even though I wanted to share a pic (not to gloat) I knew it would be easy to track down, and due to where I live it's easy to see whether I was home or not. Not a rare car by any means, but how many '14 plate cars in particular colour in a particular model do you see in any one area? Matching cars could be 5-10 miles apart easy
There're a lot of comments saying thieves are too thick to use technology for robbing people. Maybe some are, but there are plenty of tech-savvy people with no scruples who might use information like this. To-order car thieves use plenty of technology to do their business, for example. And furthermore, I'm sure we all know plenty of houses that were mysteriously robbed at an opportune moment (the night everybody went on a trip, for example).
Thieves mightn't be cross-referencing databases using various API's, but they're not so thick as to miss opportunities that might present themselves through Facebook posts etc.
I don't see a problem with increasing awareness of the possibilities.
Yep this is exactly what I mean. BMW's get stolen around here often, robbers programming new keys without breaking a sweat, and knowing how smash windows and get in without setting off the alarm:
When the risk/reward of theft is skewed so poorly in a thief's favour, and considering that there's a precedent of unscrupulous technological usage, I don't think it'd unrealistic for people to monitor social networks in this manner to look for opportunities.
In your experience, are certain new cars more likely to be stolen? I suppose any car can easily be taken by waking the owner up at night with a weapon in their face and asking for the keys...
It would be obviously difficult to pull off, but I'd like to see some estimations on how many robberies occurred based on information gained form social networks. I am guessing it is such a small percentage that these fears are completely irrational. If you are going to take the time to make this site and present this argument, I'd like to see some shred of data to substantiate your claims that social networks are really endangering the "careless people" who use them. Especially if you are going out of your way to call those people careless.
When I look at your site on my iPhone 5 in landscape mode the title changes from "Please Don't Rob Me" to just "Rob Me". You should consider fixing that.
Cash, jewelry, portable electronic devices. Burglars here in France sweep the home in three minutes and that is pretty much all that they care about. There are of course exceptions when circumstances warrant and opportunities arise - but those items are the bread and butter of industrial burglary.
TV, computer, phones, cash, jewelry, clothing, any type of appliance, power tools, medicines, alcohol, cigarettes, toys, ...
I'm not sure what kind of houses you have in mind that have nothing that can easily be transported and sold... Except for the furniture, most houses are full of stuff, and most of it can be sold.
That's what I was thinking. Stuff in my house is either too bulky or don't have much resale value (as stolen goods). Our house was burglarized while living in Switzerland, and they did not touch any of the electronics, presumably too bulky. Cost of replacing the broken window/frame was the most costly aspect.
From all the things listed, jewelry seems to be the most likely target.
Back up a pick-up with a house maintenance/painters/renovations company logo on it and no one will look twice. But yeah, probably not worth their time when new 60"s sell for under $1000 at Best Buy.
Indian families have been targeted by criminals looking for gold. Throughout the U.S. and world it seems.
Police say the ring of thieves averaged two burglaries per week and netted approximately $2 million over the past year.
...
Pentis says they found the suspects the same way the alleged thieves found their victims — through Facebook.
“A lot of these are Facebook, MySpace, Instagram, where they’re bragging, showing gold and cash from their robberies, with their face,” the asst. sheriff said.
Which brings up another point. Burglary can be a dangerous business. I know if someone accidentally burgled my house while I was home it would not end well.
Speaking of irrational fears: I always fear that I forgot my keys while leaving my flat. Now I know that I just need to post some holiday pictures of myself on instagram and eventually somebody will show up to help me get back in - for free!
Kudos to the project! I believe the best way to make people aware of privacy issues are sites like this. These "wtf am I doing?" moments are really educative.
For added safety, the implementor may add this feature prior to the "Rob house" step: