Today’s Daily Mail has a double whammy of bad news for fans of ‘the internet’, finding the worldwide web is responsible not only for a resurgence of football violence but it is also to blame for a potential increase in burglary.
First up:
The internet is fuelling a terrifying resurgence in football violence involving veteran hooligans, say police sources. Fans officially banned from grounds up and down the country are using mobile phones and the web to choreograph punch-ups before and after matches.
Damn you, ‘the internet’! Though even the Mail admits, in the same article, that the recent and entirely predictable scenes when Millwall and West Ham fans clashed recalled “the mayhem-scarred Seventies and Eighties - when Saturday afternoon meant violence”…and mobile phones and the internet were nowt but a twinkle in the hooligans’ eyes.
Moving on:
Users of social networking websites could face higher insurance premiums because burglars are using them to 'shop' for victims' personal details. Many of the millions of users of these sites post details about their home, whereabouts and holiday plans on them - effectively an invitation to a burglar.
Outrageous! Shouldn’t we strip Tim Berners-Lee of his knighthood for inventing this evil and forcing it upon us? Or, maybe the use of the word ‘could’ warns of some degree of speculation here?
In order to follow most sensible people on Facebook, a burglar would need to be their friend. And, if they are their friend then they probably already know where they live and when they’re going on holiday, though may not feel inclined to burgle their house (due to aforementioned friendship).
‘But the Mail has a case study of somebody who went to Glastonbury and got burgled while she was away, having mentioned the annual festival on her Facebook page,’ I hear you protest in defence of the Mail's sound logic.
True (assuming it is). But where else did she mention her trip to Glasto? On the train, or in a taxi home one evening that dropped her at her door? At the hairdressers or down the local pub from where it would be easy to follow her back? Or maybe, just maybe, walking out her front door with a tent, sleeping bag and 45 litre rucksack on her back was a bit of a giveaway.
In truth, social networking is likely to be a far less useful and practical tool to burglars than their own eyes and ears in the local community. Even opportunism and dumb luck will likely play a greater role. But then, that kind of pragmatism wouldn't be 'news', and nor would it fit with the Mail's overarching premise that 'the internet', along with other evils such as 'foreigners', is very likely to bring down society, or at least give us a nasty touch of cancer; somehow.
You could also point out that there's about 180,000 people at Glastonbury (back of the enevelope, that's 0.3% of the British population) and that on 2007/08 figures, there'd be around 10,000 house burglaries in the five days that most festival goers are at Glasto.
Even if burglars targeted houses entirely at random (rather than having plenty of non-Facebook methods for opportunistically working out when a house is unoccupied) you'd expect quite a few people to come back from Glastonbury to find their home had been broken into.
Posted by: Tom | Aug 27, 2009 at 13:30