There’s a very easy way to find out if someone is home or not: calling their landline. If no one answers, chances are the house is empty. If you really want to make sure, you can simply check if the lights are on.

And yes, robbers actually used these tactics to rob people’s house for ages; this is why, before summer vacations, you’ll see magazines advising you to have a friend periodically visit your house, turn the lights on and generally create the impression the house is not abandoned.

Faced with criticism that their service is helping robbers find empty houses, the folks at Foursquare point out that there are other ways of finding out someone’s location: a cleverly designed Twitter or Facebook search will do the trick just as well.

It doesn’t end there: A robber that can use a computer and a phone has at least 20 different ways of finding out if someone’s not at home. The easiest of them all is still checking out if the lights are on and if no one answers the phone.

Yes, location-based services pose a certain security risk (they actually have far bigger privacy implications), and it’s good that someone pointed it out to the folks who perhaps haven’t thought twice about sharing their Foursquare info on Twitter and Facebook, too. But at some point, one has to realize that not using any location services won’t do much to protect you from being robbed.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you should be careless about using a service like Twitter or Foursquare. Acquaint yourself with how they work, their terms of service and don’t share any info if you’re not completely sure who you’re sharing it with. Other than that, there’s no reason to be paranoid.

Tags: foursquare, location

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