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Comment by TedDoesntTalk | Hacker News Reader

> Use your own site to publish checkins instead of Foursquare

I never understood why people publish their location. Why does anyone care except maybe your significant other, who you can just text? Do your friends really care? Does your family? Do your coworkers?

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My friends and family do. I check in at a place on Swarm and get comments from friends, or if friends are already out in the area but we didn't explicitly coordinate we will find each other if desired. It's also nice to look back and try to remember that one restaurant we went to in that place with the great dish that we now cannot remember and look it up in check in history. It's been a great mechanic for my friends and I.

Thanks for posting - you are the only person whose posted a reason why he does this.

One time as a highschool delinquent I realised a lot of the girls in my class would leave Instagram's location tagging thing on. Not sure if its still a feature - but you could literally see a map of where their posts were taken. I figured some of the "clumps" of posts on the map were significant locations like their house or their friends house, etc.

I never did anything with that information but it boggles my mind why people leave that on/turn it on themselves. Pereaps they didn't even know it was on, but I'm not sure.

I can imagine some niches (like freelance war correspondent) where it could make sense but it can also be easily abused for nefarious use. We should IMO always lean to: no, unless [..]. Where unless could include question of does the pros beat the cons? Why share it? What could be the repercussions? For example, we could assume nobody wants to kill a freelance war correspondent but if you look at the current major war in Ukraine I don't believe that to be true.

Ten years ago when location publishing was novel, there were worries that it'd make it easy to burgle people, since you'd know when they weren't home. I haven't heard of any burglaries specifically attributable to someone posting their location online, but it's what I think about every time I see someone do this.

> I never heard of any burglaries specifically attributable to someone posting their location online

Upcoming Brooklyn rapper Pop Smoke was robbed and murdered under this exact scenario about 2 years ago. There are abundant sources, but here are two:

https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ny-pop-smoke-put-a...

https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/entertainment/sde2017/200140...

It seems like he wasn't robbed because he posted his location, but because he posted his location as well as ludicrous amounts of cash, jewelry, and vehicles.

Perhaps that's a factor, but having expensive jewelry and luxury vehicles around is commonplace for pretty much all upcoming rappers.

I don't doubt they are targeted by robbers for valuables whether they're explicitly posted or not.

I'm sure it happens all the time. I even learned recently while bingewatching that social media is how the Bling Ring burglary teens would figure out when Paris Hilton, etc weren't home.

Also, social media location services have been used to figure out where people were in order to follow them and murder them e.g. Molly McLaren. (Social Media Murders Episode 3, I said I was bingewatching...)

For this reason (logical or not) I always feel avoid posting pictures of myself while on vacation and have a tendency to post a "summary" after I return home.

If you just share your location within swarm it’s unlikely anyone else beside a close group of friends would know.

However anyone with a public Instagram account can easily guess where you are by watching your Instagram stories.

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