Twitter, Foursquare Brand Challenge: Keeping The Faith

Here’s the good news AND the bad news: social networking platforms allow everyone to know where you are, and when. That could be useful information for your wife. And your wife’s former boyfriend who just got out of jail.

Boy Van Amstel, creator of PleaseRobMe.com, attempts to prove that very point with his creepy-named website. Van Amstel’s site proves how easy it is for people of ill-repute and dubious intentions to track down and locate houses where the owners are not around, for one reason or another.

The advent of new technologies, such as Twitter and Foursquare, are often greeted with a spectrum of reactions from utter naivety to outright paranoia. In this case, we’re dealing with naivety. The amount of private up-to-the-moment information available about individuals revealed on social networking sites is staggering – and Van Amstel saw the inherent risk in this.

“It started with me and a friend looking at our Twitter feeds and seeing more and more Foursquare posts," said Van Amstel. “People were checking in at their house, or their girlfriend's or friend's house, and sharing the address – I don't think they were aware of how much they were sharing.”

Van Amstel even went as far as to point out how easy his site was to make (it only took four hours), and how it works – using simple Twitter searches. Van Amstel’s site reveals that people are either too trustworthy of social networking sites, or simply ignorant about Internet privacy.

And social networking brands such as Twitter and Foursquare need to act on this information before users swing from states of ignorance to paranoia – and begin to lose faith in their brands.