Original Blog Entry: Man Gets Robbed After Tweeting That He is on Vacation

truesee — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 03:23:02 GMT

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Twitter Robbery of Arizona Man Could Freak Some Folks Out

Twitter -- you know what it is, obviously, please, in addition to followin PTG and myself? -- doesn't have many downsides, provided you're not some cranky old person that hates those dang kids and their blog machines! Or if you're Twitter user @IzzyVideo who recently tweeted that he and his family were going on vacation. Good times, right? Um, no. He got robbed, likely as a result of the social media site's ability to reach hundreds of thousands of people.

On May 24th, Izzy dropped this:

We made it to Kansas City in one piece. We're visiting @noellhyman's family. Can't wait to get some good video while we're here. :-)

And then four days later ...

Well, it's confirmed. Someone stole my Mac Pro and two displays while I'm visiting relatives here in Kansas City.

But, fortunately (I guess) the robbers left his Xbox. Now, before everyone decides to freak out and blame the Twittermachinez for this horrible travesty, let's go ahead and point out the same thing that Izzy did: his Twitter account automatically updates his Facebook status. That means Izzy could have accidentally sent this message out to thousands of people (I'm not his friend, so I have no clue how many he has) in addition to the over 2,000 folks that follow him on Twitter.

And the other thing, as I tell my parents often, is that we live in a very transparent world when it comes to internet personalities -- most of the interwebz people aren't hidden behind some odd name or false front anymore, particularly if they earn their living online. Which means that if you see Person X tweet that they're somewhere on vacation, and that person has a website where they make a living, you can probably find out where they live (or at the very least, check the WhoIs.net registration for the site) or at the very least get your Google/White Pages on.

Izzy actually has his full name, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and mobile phone number on his website. That's not particularly shocking, because it's his business site, but the thing is with a mobile number and a first and last name, you can track anyone in the world down to their home address pretty quickly. Which is what someone, obviously, decided to do.

Either that or one of Izzy's friends is a real jerk. The lesson? Well, it's not that Twitter is evil or the Internet will kill us all as many people will probably shout once they see his story all over the news (it's been picked up by ABC, NBC, CBS and then tweeted by IJustine, who's actually bigger than all of those, somehow).

The lesson is that you have to be careful when you broadcast something on the interwebz. Yes, it's that simple: just think before you tweet, folks.

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