In quite possibly the dumbest news story of the day, a man who posted on Twitter that he made it to Kansas City had his house in Arizona robbed presumably later that day. He feels that it might be connected to his Twitter post:
We made it to Kansas City in one piece. We’re visiting @noellhyman’s family. Can’t wait to get some good video while we’re here. 
Taking it a step further, it’s not hard to find information about people online. In this case, his Twitter account has his full name in it: Israel Hyman. Doing a Google search turns up the following sites which he owns:
israelhyman.com
izzyvideo.com
That’s great because now you can do a WHOIS search on his domains and find information. Unfortuantely, the first one has privacy. Why he’s paying for that is beyond me considering his second site, izzyvideo.com, is wide open with information. Should he chose to change that later, I won’t post the information here. Now that we have his address, we can go to live.com and see a birds eye view of his house. It’s a nice house, too. Right on the corner, a red SUV in the driveway, and a nice privacy fence around the house. If you want to call and make sure he’s not home, of course you’re welcome to do that too considering his WHOIS information gives you the address and likely his cell phone number (since it does not match what whitepages.com has as the phone number). This all proves that with a few clicks, you can find tons of information about a person. While a phone number and address is not damaging and typical information about a person that can be easily found, combine that with information the user chooses to post and you could have some damaging information. Could it be taken further with the information known? Absolutely.
So now that Twitter is all mainstream with Ashton Kutcher recently jumping on board in a competition against Larry King (and then later Kutcher threatening to stop tweeting at all), I guess the media needs something on which to blame a house robbery. It gets even more asinine with the people they interviewed. On the news report (video was on TV and the article is a little different), it mentions of a Facebook user who likely won’t be posting when or where she is going on Facebook anymore. That’s a bit drastic considering you can lock out any users on Facebook (and worldwide) you wish from seeing your status message and pages with the click of a few buttons in the privacy section of your account. My guess is she doesn’t realize you can do that with Facebook (unlike Twitter where it’s a wide open service).
The sad part is that police are actually investigating whether the tweet and robbery are connected. I’m not sure how you can investigate something like that considering anyone in the world could have viewed that tweet that day and they don’t need a Twitter account to do it. So what does that leave police with? IP addresses to which they can take to ISP’s who would give up the information to law enforcement. But then what? You still have potentially hundreds of suspects based on what, viewing public information? That’ll lead to a dead end I’m willing to bet. Do the police in Arizona really have nothing better to do that look into the connection? It’s almost like leaving your key on the front porch and then being shocked that you were robbed. Would the police look into the latter scenario with the same scrutiny as they are with this would be Twitter robber? Doubt it. Granted I am sure they are investigating other means of who the robber could be (fingerprints come to mind for starters).
What’s worse? The victim acts surprised it happened on his website (granted it’s a shocking event, don’t get me wrong) and further goes to say:
Of course, the burglary may also be a random crime — which unfortunately is becoming more common in my neighborhood.
Quite possible…
I’m not saying that what he posted on Twitter was why he was robbed nor am I saying that his family had it coming to them. I do feel bad that they were robbed and am glad he learned his lesson, according to his post, even if it was the hard way unfortunately. Why this made national news though is beyond me. Considering the hype over 140 characters lately and celebrities joining on, I can see why though. Truly sad when the media has nothing better to report on and it just goes to show that if you’re not careful with what you post online, the information is there to be had and used at a another person’s discretion.
