Hussain M Elius

Status updates did seem to be a great idea. Apart from the occasional emo messages, you could simply login to your Facebook or Twitter homepage and get a quick glance on what your friends (even the ones you haven’t seen in the last five years or aren’t necessarily ‘friends’ with) were doing with their lives. The mundane became the interesting.

Don’t get us wrong, it still is. So much can be shared with so little an effort. However, what concerns us is how people don’t foresee the implications of it all.

The problem with telling people where you are, is that you are informing others you’re definitely not in one place… home. That, and the unwavering willingness (or temptation) to add total strangers just to increase the friend count into your private radio party to broadcast holiday plans, whereabouts, purchases, home interior and personal information creates a field day for professional burglars. Take the story of the podcaster who tweeted that he was out of town only to come back to discover that his house was robbed. Tomorrow’s technology today, aye?

There is in fact, PleaseRobMe.com, a website which works by sucking all your public twitter/foursquare data and listing “opportunities” (no really, they actually call these opportunities). Imagine what “opportunities” does for someone (breaking into a house and leaving flower petals on the porch is illegal too, by the way). On one end, you’re leaving your lights on to tell the whole world that you are awake at night while on the other end, you’re basically shouting from your rooftop that you will not be home from 10th to 12th of next month because you’ll be leaving to meet your long lost friend in a different city… ample information for someone donning a black mask to drop by for an uninvited dinner. The website was created to demonstrate an important point. One about proving a point. Or about getting rich. We can’t decide.

Hell, you don’t even need to tell the people where you are. Twitter recently released a Geolocation thingy which does that automagically. By the way, just because we’re bashing twitter doesn’t mean your beloved Facebook isn’t out of the crossfire. Remember how Facebook made its status updates public? Yeah. And who says that hot guy/girl who sent you a request to “make friendsheep” isn’t a bald guy wearing nothing but lungi and reading the Bangla version of Facebook for newbies?

You might be thinking we’re exaggerating, things like this will never happen in Bangladesh. See, that’s where you are wrong. Maybe we are. Maybe we are not. One of us at least, was rudely interrupted on a date by his so-called friends because he was foolish enough to get caught up on the novelty of Google Latitude running on his new phone, just because they wanted to “meet the new girl”. Although, this is nothing equivalent to getting a home burglarised, he did lose an extra 500 bucks on food for that.

Convenient, eh?

Published in Rising Star, The Daily Star, 11 March 2010