In 1982, I invited unknown masked men to my apartment in New York City via the Internet. Seven years later, the apartment I was living in was burglarized and my portable computer was stolen. The Internet was much smaller then. I had been working at Bell Laboratories and the unknown masked men where people on a Usenet group coming to a Halloween party. Between 1982 and 1989, I moved several times, so I don’t believe there was any correlation between the two events.

Since then, I’ve started blogging and writing details about when I would be away from my home. In 2006, I started using Twitter. I’m not sure how long I’ve been on BrightKite, but it has probably been about two years. I’ve been on Foursquare for quite a while, but never started using it until I upgraded to my latest phone. With that, I’ve posted many times when I’ve been away from my house.

However, the vast majority of the times that I’ve made posts like that, someone else has been home, the neighbors have been watching the house, the dog has been standing guard, the alarm system has been on, and/or many other factors have made it so that if anyone managed to connect my online message with my real address and headed over to case out my house, they would have been disappointed at best.

So, it is with some interest that I’m reading all the posts about the latest sensational fear-mongering website, PleaseRobMe. “The goal of this website is to raise some awareness on this issue and have people think about how they use services like Foursquare”. That is an important goal. However, the sensationalism and one-sided nature of it detracts from the goal.

Yes, people should think about all the content they put online, their location, their activities, pictures of what they are doing, and so on. Everything has a risk and reward profile. There are risks of letting everyone know when you are not home. I believe those risks are much less than people writing about PleaseRobMe indicate. Just because you’re not home doesn’t mean that the house is empty or unprotected. For that matter, letting your neighbors know that you are not home may even encourage them to keep a closer eye on your home and you may, in fact, be better protected than if you hadn’t let your neighbors via an online service that you are not home.

No, instead the site and the responses people have had to it sound an awful lot like the famous movie ‘Reefer Madness’, or the warnings from parents to kids not to make faces because their faces might get stuck that way, or not to masturbate because they might go blind.

By the way, as I write this, my wife and daughter are out running errands. Our dog is sleeping, but I’m sitting at my computer in my home office. Watch out everyone.