Location Based Crime?
Unlike most of the people reporting on the "Facebook crime spree", Jeff Jarvis did some actual reporting:
I emailed Nashua, NH detective Dan Archambault, who told me that only two of the cases involved Facebook and in each case, “one or two of the suspects were Facebook friends with the respective homeowners. They basically had access to the walls and could read that the families were away on vacation. The information was only available to friends and the Facebook Places feature was NOT a part of this. And finally my advice to Facebook users is carefully pick your friends and watch what you post.”
That's way less exciting than stalking criminals trawling the social seas for location based information, but it is what happened. The last line in the quoted section is accurate online and off; most of the thefts I've heard about locally happened based on idle chatter between kids, where some of the "friends" were drug addicts looking for a cheap score. As Jeff says, pick your friends carefully - and that's true online and off.
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