“Two robbers have paid a visit to a house in south-eastern Australia, hours after a teenager posted a photo on Facebook of a large sum of cash. The masked men, armed with a knife and a club, struck the home of the 17-year-old girl’s mother in the country town of Bundanoon on Thursday, police say. Her mother told the men her daughter no longer lived there. It is not clear how the robbers found the family address. The Facebook image was at the grandmother’s Sydney house. The men searched the house and took a small amount of cash and a small number of personal objects before leaving. No-one was injured.” Should I be laughing or crying?
There has always been a rule on the internet, don’t post anything about your personal finances. This girl need to learn that rule AND why you should actually set Facebooks privacy settings. Meagre as they are, they still do the job to keep randoms from accessing the majority of you account.
And just to be pre-emptive of the hardliners out there that think that you shouldn’t post anything personal on Facebook, while there is certain info that shouldn’t be on facebook, like say your sexual fetish, a lot of personal data can be helpful to your own friends and people you know. Most personal data on facebook is fine if you actually use the privacy settings and only add people you actually know.
Edited 2012-05-29 11:13 UTC
“We’re going to Bonnie Doon!” “ahhh… the serenity”
Oh wait you said Bundanoon, sorry. Just down the road from ‘ol mate Ivan Milat’s hunting ground isn’t it?
My money is on EXIF tags left in the image.
iPhones notoriously leave lat longs embedded in the image, allowing people to put the coords into Google Maps or whatever and get site to return the closest address. I bet other smart/advanced phones do the same as well.
I’ve seen people post pictures of animal cruelty and the pictures have EXIF tags with coordinates. People do the same as above, and then contact the local law enforcement and report on the abusers using their own photographic proof.
FTA:
I guess we just have to chalk it up to stupid criminals. ;^)
When you upload a picture to Facebook any EXIF info is removed.
At least, when I upload a picture and then view it, save it, the info is gone. Perhaps the info does get saved and can be obtained if you know how, but it seems simply viewing ‘n’ saving doesn’t yield any EXIF data.