Are Twitter, FoursSquare, Gowalla helping people to burglarize your house or rob you?  You are broadcasting that you’re not home. What if thieves know where you live or where you are going to be?

Webroot commissioned a survey in June of 1,645 social network users (including 624 UK-based) who own geo-location-ready mobile devices.  Of the 600 surveyed in England, East Asia and Africa, 73% say they share their whereabouts with “strangers” and 55% said they worry over the loss of privacy using geolocation data.

Techcrunch indicates that FourSquare is five times larger than Gowalla and is growing by 75% each day.  (FourSquare has about 1.2 million users to Gowalla’s 340,000).

FourSquare and Gowalla are mobile device location based games that let you compete to win points on the number of times you visit average and extraordinary locations.   Skout is a third game that allows one to find dates in near where they are.  The specter of stories that could be generated out of such an application is mind-boggling.

Millennial Marketing, an online blog, says Generation Y is willing to sacrifice privacy as the price to pay for online free services.  

As the Center for Democracy & Technology

indicates n its report on “Oversharing and Location Awareness” (2/24/10) “If you're comfortable being a human homing beacon, that's fine, we just want you to be fully aware of what that means and the potential risks it might involve.”  Seems some people need to be reminded about the importance of Constitutional rights.