A couple of years ago, I discussed the website "Please Rob Me" here. Please Rob Me was launched with the mission of demonstrating that users of geolocation services such as Foursquare who saw fit to broadcast their location ("I’m at the Grand Canyon!") were, simultaneously, announcing to the world that they were not at home. In its heyday, the Please Rob Me website provided a real-time feed of people checking in with geolocation services, half-jokingly presenting this list of people who were not at home as "opportunities" for robbers.
After raising some awareness of the issue, the Please Rob Me site stopped providing the feed noted above. As I noted in follow-up posts, however, there are numerous old-school ways that people say "Please Rob Me" to the world. These include listing a funeral or wedding in the newspaper, as astute robbers also read newspapers and have been known to strike houses while the residents are at the funeral home or the wedding reception. These also can include signing up for a cruise. In 2010, a cruise line employee was arrested for burglarizing the homes of 24 vacationers after using the company’s reservation system to learn who was on board the cruise — and therefore not at home.
