Twitter Knows Where You Are

Twitter Map

You’re about to go on vacation.  Finally, no more work.  No more responsibilities.  You’re excited to get away and you want to rub your friend’s noses in it.  Without a thought, you pick up your phone and send out a Tweet.  “Kiss off, suckers.  I’m on my way to the beach!”  You probably didn’t even pay attention to the fact that Twitter now includes location data.  You didn’t think twice about accepting when it asked if it could include this information in your messages.  You probably didn’t think that there’s a map like this one – something that shows where you live when you sent the note telling the world you wouldn’t be home for the next week.

After a great vacation, you come home to find the place robbed.  I’ll bet you probably never put that together with the fact that you broadcast to the world that you’d be away from your home, and by the way, here’s exactly where to find it.

Location data is really useful stuff.  When I take photographs, I like to embed geotagging information to display the photos on a map.  It’s useful for me at home and it may help other photographers to know where to get a similar shot, if they want to visit the same place.  Check-in tools like FourSquare and Gowalla link to your Twitter account to show where you are.  It’s cute.  It tells people that you aren’t at home, but at least it doesn’t point them to your home.  It’s not the same when you wake up on Monday morning and send a note from your house that you’re “On my way to work.”  For the next eight hours or so, it lets folks know there’s probably an empty house waiting.  All they have to do is look at the map associated with your message.  All they have to do is build a filter that looks for key words to identify people going to “work, vacation, road trip, etc.”  You get the idea.

You’re not being tracked by something insidious.  You’re just telling the world where you are, or aren’t.