There is no question that the internet is full of some wonderful things. Pound for pound, the great ways the internet has made our lives better, improved communication and provided information to people is profoundly good. But there is also some ugly out there in cyberspace. We know about the ugly in the form of pornography, hate web sites and violence oriented videos. But how about a website that helps criminals know who to burglarize?

It would appear that such a website is now available called, appropriately enough, PleaseRobMe. The site uses information from the web to track when a person is away from home on a long trip, which means that they can be robbed. Taken on face value, this is such an ugly idea that you wonder why law enforcement lets it keep going. But things are not exactly as they seem on face value.

Actually, if PleaseRobMe did point bad guys at homes to knock over, that would be a boon to law enforcement. All the cops would have to do is keep up with the site and stake out this week’s easiest targets for crooks. Boom, you have yourself an easy arrest. But PleaseRobMe wasn’t designed to help the criminal element or the hard-nosed cops who are out to put them in the slammer. It was designed to throw a scare into people who share way too much online.

Boy Van Amstel was one of the developers of PleaseRobMe and he maintains that the idea for the site was not to help out thieves who need a boost figuring out who to rob. The whole thing started with an online game called Foursquare that uses information about where a player is physically located is part of how the game is played. Van Amstel and his pals noticed that players were also posting Twitter comments that were very specific about where they were and that it took very little to map a person’s movements using this information.

What Van Amstel and his two partners, Frank Groeneveld and Barry Borsboom realized was that these people were way too honest online. The result was that a crook with any curiosity at all could figure out when someone was away from home based on their online postings and use that to commit crime.

PleaseRobMe is intended to be a wake up call to people not to be so transparent on the internet. And with GPS tracking rapidly being added to the mix of what you can disclose online, that problem could be one of the big security risks of the next few years. The developers of PleaseRobMe maintain that the information they provide would be difficult to use to commit crimes which backs up that they only did this to alert the internet world of the dangers of too much disclosure.

So heads up because it’s a worthwhile warning sign for all of us to be a little less open to the world because there are some people in the world who are evil and would use that information against you. They may not need the encouragement of PleaseRobMe to come on the attack. Let’s work together not to help them.