The growing popularity of location based people finder sites is making searching for a person a trivial pursuit.<\/p>\n
Sites like Foursquare.com allow people to “check in” their exact location from their mobile phone. Gowalla.com is another location-based tool where people can announce their real-time location for others to find.<\/p>\n
In addition, Twitter’s location-enabled service allows people to broadcast the location of their tweets. Facebook Places could potentially make the location of millions of people easy to find ( at least for their friends ). Facebook Places is a tool that lets people ‘check in’ to Facebook using a mobile device to let friends find their exact location at the moment. Places has the potential to reach over 500 million people on Facebook.<\/p>\n
If these popular location-based tools become ubiquitous, it could make people search even easier than it is now with the growing list of people search engines like Spokeo.com, PeopleSmart.com and BeenVerified.com.<\/p>\n
Already, skip tracers and debt collectors are using Facebook’s people finder search to locate people who are delinquent on bills.<\/p>\n
While the growing number of people using social networks has been a boon for people in the search business like investigators, skip tracers, law enforcement etc., it has also made it easy for criminals to find when people are not home.<\/p>\n
A search site called PleaseRobMe.com has pulled location-based announcements from Twitter to show they knew when people were not home.<\/p>\n
According to PleaseRobMe.com:<\/p>\n
“The danger is publicly telling people where you are. This is because it leaves one place you’re definitely not . . . home. So here we are; on one end we’re leaving lights on when we’re going on a holiday, and on the other we’re telling everybody on the Internet we’re not home.”<\/p>\n
As intriguing as these new people locator and friend finder tools are, they pose risks to people who are unaware of the risks involved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The growing popularity of location based people finder sites is making searching for a person a trivial pursuit. Sites like Foursquare.com allow people to “check in” their exact location from their mobile phone. Gowalla.com is another location-based tool where people can announce their real-time location for others to find. In addition, Twitter’s location-enabled service allows […]<\/p>\n