June 6th, 2009 | 
Author: This is a little warning from your friendly, neighbour hippy.
Do you tweet from your iPhone? Are you broadcasting your location with every tweet when you are at home? Do you know what I am talking about?
If you answered “yes” to any of those questions, especially that last one, you really need to pay attention to this.
Your iPhone is location-aware, so to an extent is your iPod touch. You probably know this already. It means it can work out your location using GPS, wi-fi and/or cell phone tower information to a reasonably accurate degree. That feature is built right into the core architecture of your iPhone.
Having that information at the core, means applications like many iPhone Twitter clients, can magically grab your exact location (expressed in latitude and longitude) and attach it to your tweets and Twitter account.
If you look at people’s Twitter profiles, occasionally you will see two sets of numbers where their city would normally be…if you cut and paste those numbers into Google Maps, it shows you their exact location.
Perhaps there are times when you want to broadcast your location, for example, you are visiting a famous landmark and want your tweets to reflect that. Or maybe you are out on a Saturday night and you want your friends to easily be able to find you, because its your round. That’s all cool.
But what if you are at home, merrily tweeting away about your two-week holiday abroad that starts tomorrow and you’re not aware you’re sending out your home address with every message? Suppose you have a photo of yourself on your account, or hundreds of them on your linked Facebook page.
What would it take for some enterprising criminal to park up on your street and watch for you to leave, knowing your flat will be empty for a fortnight?
Very little.
Think I’m being paranoid? Think again, because something like this happened recently in Arizona. Here, check out this local report.
So what can you do to avoid this happening to you?
Simple, become more aware of location awareness.
If you tweet from your iPhone (or iPod Touch, or any other location aware device, if one exists), go into the settings of your preferred Twitter client and turn off location services. The setting is someplace different in every app, and if you can’t find it in the app, look on the main settings section from your home screen.
When the app asks you to turn them on again, like it did the first time you used the app, say “no”, unless you want to broadcast your location. And if you are home, or where you work, this should probably always be “no”.
You can re-enable this feature if you do want to use it, when you are out and about, but I really recommend keeping it switched off as your default setting.
Also, check your own Twitter profile, to see what you have listed as your location. You might discover a little surprise.
If you wish to change it, log into your account from the web and go to Settings, then find the little box for location and type something suitably vague. Mine says: “north London, UK, Earth”, in case anyone confuses it with the Venusian version.
There’s one more simple thing you can do to protect yourself, when you send tweets, don’t give out too many specific track-able, real-world details about yourself.
I realise if you are tweeting under your own name, and can be found by directory enquiries or (gasp) in the white pages, it may already be too late, but if you are at all privacy minded, neither of those things will be true of you. They are certainly not true of me, but I am extremely protective of my privacy online and off.
If you’re someone who didn’t realise you’ve been practically attaching your home address to every tweet sent from your iPhone, this advice is especially for you. Just send me what you saved in the increase to your home contents insurance post-burglary and we’ll call it even.
