Who needs a tracking device when someone can find your house from your Twitter?
WeKnowYourHouse.com, a creepy new website that just launched Sunday, shows just how easy it is for someone to find out where you live in 140 characters or less.
It’s supposed to be a social experiment, according to the site’s creators. They want people to realize that while tweeting about being home is not necessarily a problem, it happens often enough that it could one day become an issue.
“The site was created to show its really dumb to check in at home, or say you’re at home with locations enabled,” the creators told the Huffington Post. “People need to understand this, whether they like it or not, and a site of this nature attracts attention and gets results.”
The process is really quite simple, they explain. They search “at home” through the Twitter Search API in JSON format, and they aggregate the tweets that contain data location and with a geocoder they’re able to get an address that they can place a photo of where you live and it goes on their front page.
“This is represented as the latitude and longitude, and is completely open for any website or applications to process,” the creators said on their website. “This website simply takes that, runs it through a geocoder to turn it into a human readable address, and links it with Google Street View.”
A quick look at Topsy shows over 11,000 people have tweeted the phrase “at home” in the last 24 hours, though not every tweet is necessarily posted from a person’s house or about being home.
However, the creators stress that the data only exists on the website for one hour before it is deleted forever, and if you have been featured or worry about being featured on the website, you can opt out of the service.
But if you want a foolproof way to opt out completely, you should just turn off the location data on Twitter or refrain from tweeting when you’re home (or when you’re not home, for that matter).
Photo via kodiax2