For years it’s been possible to locate a mobile phone, with services available to ensure parents feel safe about their children. But recently, with the emergence of certain social location sharing services (such as Google Latitude, Loopt, Foursquare, and even twitter), individuals are opting to voluntarily share their location with friends, or even the whole world.

As a result, a service called Please Rob Me has emerged – showing potentially empty houses, advertising their emptiness. It is based upon people sharing their location then mentioning that they are leaving home.

We talk about where the line lie, and our personal views on the privacy of our locations’. Stalking, kidnap, advertising, crowd control, traffic control and tin-foil hats are all mentioned.

We also reference:

• A paper by Dr. Sjaak Nouwt: Reasonable Expectations of Geo-Privacy?
• Real Time Rome: An MIT project in conjunction with Telecom Italia to track population movements around a Madona Concert and the World Cup

Finally we wrap up, mentioning two upcoming events:

• This Saturday Skynet are hosting Matt Zimmerman, ex-CTO of Canonical. More info on the Skynet and Ubuntu wiki’s.
• The Irish Blog awards have released their long-list, the event will be hosted on March 27^th

So, are we stupid to be giving away so much information, or is it a useful technological progression? Leave us a comment with your thoughts.

The audio of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

This show originally aired on Wednesday February 24^th on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 12:30pm.