Wow! Not far from my 'hometown'. Another great news item from NPR....
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Spygate is officially over, those words, from a town council member in Riverhead, New York, on Long Island. The spygate he's referring to doesn't involve Russian double agents or top-secret security breaches. It's all about swimming pools.
The town of Riverhead has voted to stop using Google Earth satellite images to find backyard pools that don't have proper permits. Leroy Barnes, Jr., is Riverhead's chief building inspector. Thanks for being with us.
Mr. LEROY BARNES JR. (Chief Building Inspector, Riverhead, New York): How are you?
BLOCK: I'm okay. Now, when did you start using Google Earth to find these pools?
Mr. BARNES: About a year and a half ago.
BLOCK: Uh-huh, and how many total number of pools did you find that were not in compliance, didn't have the right permits?
Mr. BARNES: Well, there were people that had open permits but that had expired. So I consider them not having permits. So there was a total of 250 pools that had either an open permit with no inspection, or there were pools that had no permits at all to begin with and were constructed.
BLOCK: And you were able to figure that out by looking at these satellite images and comparing them against I guess the records you keep.
Mr. BARNES: Right, and also checking on our building permit system to see if they had a permit. So when they started to look at the ones that had expired, we started stumbling across ones that had no permits to begin with, and that's when we started using the Google Earth to verify.
BLOCK: Hmm. Did you have anybody complaining to you about privacy and how you found out?
Mr. BARNES: Well, you know, it's funny. Most of the people that complained were the ones that didn't have the permits.
BLOCK: Well, yeah.
Mr. BARNES: I've gotten a lot of emails and kind calls from people that live in the town, and they were happy that we were doing that because a lot of people don't get permits because they don't want to pay property taxes. So by not getting a permit, the assessors are not aware that those structures are there, and they can't assess them.
So that's what's created such an issue for people. But I use it strictly for safety.
BLOCK: And what are the safety issues that you're worried about here?
Mr. BARNES: Well, every pool that's constructed in the state of New York has to have a legal barrier around the pool, and it also has to be alarmed. You have to have a barrier, which is a four-foot fence with a self-closing, self-latching gate. And also, you're supposed to have alarms on your rear doors in the fenced area of the rear yard so that if you have kids and they go outside, the alarm trips. So they know their kids are in the backyard.
And, you know, people leave gates open unlocked, and kids do fall in pools, and they do drown. I mean, our local, our Newsday, which is an island-wide newspaper, certainly gave a very nice editorial towards my office and me saying that it was about time that some of the towns are using their heads and using the resources available that are free.
BLOCK: So when you hear one of the town council members there in Riverhead refer to this as spygate, maybe he's joking, maybe he's not. What do you think?
Mr. BARNES: I think they're doing it affectionately, honestly. You know, I talked to Mr. Gabrielson(ph) about it after. So, you know, he's not trying to be offensive to me or anyone else. I think he was just joking around, and it turned out to be called spygate. But we're not really spying.
BLOCK: Well, Mr. Barnes, it's good to talk to you. Thanks very much.
Mr. BARNES: Well, thank you, Melissa, and you have a good day and a nice weekend.
BLOCK: You, too.
Mr. BARNES: Take care.
BLOCK: That's Leroy Barnes Jr. He's the chief building inspector for Riverhead, Long Island, where the town council voted Wednesday to stop using Google Earth or other satellite images to find pools without permits.
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Listen to the whole interview HERE
Click here for the full story: A Week Without Social MediaA Week Without Social Media
Looking forward to the results!
Mike
I also encourage anyone to visit charity:water at http://www.charitywater.org/#
Mike
Remember Please Rob Me,
the site that tried to raise awareness about the dangers of broadcasting publicly on Foursquare and other geo services when you are not home? I don’t know that any burglaries ever actually occurred as a result of the information on the site, which in any case is not operational any more (it made it’s point).
But when you take the same idea of location broadcasting and put it on a service with more than 500 million users, it is no longer just academic. People’s houses will get robbed, at least in New Hamshire. A burglary ring
in Nashua, New Hampshire targeted people who checked into places on Facebook, alerting them when they were not home. The police caught them after they broke into 50 homes and stole $100,000 worth of goods.
This seems like a good time to revisit Please Rob Me’s mission statement
:
The danger is publicly telling people where you are. This is because it leaves one place you’re definitely not… home. So here we are; on one end we’re leaving lights on when we’re going on a holiday, and on the other we’re telling everybody on the internet we’re not home. It gets even worse if you have “friends” who want to colonize your house. That means they have to enter your address, to tell everyone where they are. Your address.. on the internet.. Now you know what to do when people reach for their phone as soon as they enter your home. That’s right, slap them across the face.
Please Rob Me, indeed.
Website: facebook.com Location: Palo Alto, California, United States Founded: February 1, 2004 Funding: $836M Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users.
Facebook was founded by… Learn More
Website: foursquare.com Location: New York, New York, United States Founded: March 11, 2009 Funding: $21.4M Foursquare is a location based social network that incorporates gaming elements.
Users share their location with friends by “checking in” via a smartphone app or by text message. Points are awarded for checking in at various venues. Users can… Learn More
Information provided by CrunchBasehttp://www.necn.com/09/10/10/Burglary-ring-targets-Facebook-users-in-/landing...
via techcrunch.com
Location based social media takes a hit. Ouch.
Mike