Seriously, Why Do Friends Truly Need To Know Where You Are All Times

A new "geolocation information generator" has been launched on the internet. Its creator, Yiannis Kakavas, has given it the interesting name of Creepy. Many privacy rights advocates have raised their worries about the probable impact of this application to individual privacy. What can this new application do and why should it stir such concern?

Kakavas created Creepy as a package for Linux or Windows. The third package for Mac OS X is now in the process. In essence, this app makes use of social networking services in order to pinpoint a user's location. It can do this by collecting the information furnished by the user to the network and putting together these pieces of information. The software has just been launched, but has already shown its job efficiency in living up to its name.

Creepy has an in-built search utility to find any individual in the internet. All that the user has to do is to enter the Twitter or Flickr username of that individual then hit the "Geolocate Target" button. Creepy will then download all photos or tweets that the individual has published or posted. From each of the downloaded materials, Creepy will be particular with the user's location at the time the material was published.

To create a meaningful set of data, the software gathers every piece of available information pertaining to the user's location. After its processing, the user's different locations are presented by showing a map. Taken one by one, these data on locations do not have much to tell, but when gathered jointly as a whole, the user might really feel creepy. Too much data is revealed, compromising the user's most frequented places or hang outs, the area around his or her home, and even in his or her place of work. This data is just enough to make him or her a target of stalking.

It only took three months for Kakavas to finish the program. He made use of accessible data found in publicly available libraries like osmgpsmap, pyexif2, and tweepy. In his mind, Kakavas believes that he has created something that will persuade people to put more value on their privacy. He would like to strengthen user understanding about the dangers of casual sharing of personal information online.

He explains that those insignificant pieces of data can be easily put together in order to create more important information. It would be too late for users to realize that it would have been better if they kept those pieces of information to themselves. These are the usual ones like address, place of work, the places they hang out most often - things that users normally consider as worthless.

He also said that Creepy is for social engineers to have a better means of information gathering. Creepy can be used to perform penetration testing, especially for security analysts. Information that is gathered can be used for various reasons in later time.