When the Smartphone is an “accomplice” of burglars

Every day some burglary warnings arrive in the news-room. And every area is approached the same way: the burglaries occur with “casualness” and in different hours, not only at night.

This doesn’t mean that the events have increased, most probably it has only become simpler to make public what happens to us. We need to keep our guard up not only because it seems that thieves are always active, but because today it seems easier to go not only into houses, but in “other people’s lives”.

In what sense? We will explain that to you. We are sure of what can ease the burglars “job”: we are talking about the smartphone.

An interesting article, which was published by La Stampa recently and signed by the expert journalist of new technologies and digital culture Carola Frediani, explains in detail how our mobile phone leaves a trail of data every day, whether we like it or not.

These days there is also circulating the interview of a hacker who created an app which was renamed “app for burglars” and that when downloaded, would provide information about when someone leaves their house.

In fact, (it is an update of tonight, 16th December) this is a campaign of a big insurance company in order to make aware on the subject of privacy and online safety, as it is explained here.

We asked Roberto Giardina, an expert on indoor tracking, to what extent our smartphone, and what we consciously share, can ease burglars in houses.

 What do you think about it? Is it possible to create an app like this? Is it easy to carry out?
“According to its description, the program seems to automate the analysis of the data coming from Facebook and other social networks such as Twitter, Instagram or Foursquare. If it’s like that, the program in itself has nothing illegal, apart from the intention with which it’s used. The analysis that are collected and communicated to the user  in a “smart” way are about information that social network users authorize to be published, and the program simply “puts them together” to give accurate instructions.
An app conceived like that is similar to the focused marketing analysis: however, instead of advice that a 40-year-old user who loves books has passed in front of a bookshop, it informs also about her personal data, such as her address and the best moment for not finding her at home. These analysis are possible even on the web, but the possibility to consult it while moving and to visualize it on a map created ad hoc obviously permits to verify, until they are in front of the house they aimed for, the real absence of the people.”

Which data can be considered as “sensitive”?
“Very often among the data there are personal indications such as age, sex, school education, etc, data which can possibly be crossed with others. Furthermore, there are programs that are often used for “good” purposes, such as the traffic analysis in the maps of google, which is generated from the number of smartphones that move at a given speed along a street”.

So now let’s take our smartphone and…?
“Let’s say that having a look at the applications admitted to the geolocalisation in our smartphones is opportune. Not even the check in mania helps the security.
The same for posting pictures on social networks when we do something: pictures have localisation information which permits to understand that, if we are in a place in that moment, it’s impossible for us to be in another. In this case, it would be enough to lose the bad habit of communicate everything in real time.”