For even the poorest of cyber stalkers, it’s not that difficult to determine where someone lives based on their Facebook profile alone; indeed, there are many pictures on social media websites that show people standing if front of their homes, cars, workplaces, etc. With location-based sites added to the mix, every time you “check in” some place means that you’re saying, “I am not at home. I am here,” providing crooks vital information.

While no one wants to come home and find that their home has been burglarized, there are worse things that can happen…

Did you know that smartphones use metadata and GPS stamps to “tag” digital photos that encode Lat & Long coordinates into the image? Tags that, in essence, reveal the exact location a photo was taken? What if that picture was taken in your living room?

If you post that picture online, Ben Jackson, co-founder of the site ICanStalkU.com, says that someone can find out where you are instantly if they know how.

According to an interview on FoxNews.com, the site monitors Twitter and uses Google maps to determine when, and where, random people are located. The site shows the picture, the Tweet, and the location of numerous people in real time. The side has tracked over 50,000 different photos using geotags in 90 days.

The pictures provide “breadcrumbs,” or bits of information that aid navigation, that can provide unwanted intruders information regarding places people are likely to go.  Jackson said that they analyze data for patterns and are able to discern “where your house is, where you may work, what your favorite haunts may be, a coffee shop, restaurant, a place that you like to go to like a club of some sort. We can then piece those together and say, ‘hey, look at that. Every Friday night they like to go to this bar over on Main Street.’”

Criminals can use this data, combined with other information, to stalk victims or even burglarize homes. As the online technology becomes widespread, criminals using the Internet to commit crimes is expected to skyrocket, as the crooks are no longer required to seek opportunity, but just need for someone to deliver it them.

The section, which was under public and law-enforcement scrutiny for allowing ads that allegedly promoted prostitution, ceased in allowing adult services ads in the “Casual Encounters” section in the US in August, and Internationally in December.

The section became infamous after Philip Markhoff, a Syracuse, NY native attending medical school in Boston, MA, was arrested for robbing two paid escorts and murder/robbery of a third, Julissa Brisman.  According to Wikipedia, all three victims used craigslist to advertise their “services.”

In Jersey City, missing escort Shannon Gilbert reportedly used craigslist to advertise sexual services (NJ.com) when she disappeared somewhere between her home and Fire Island earlier this year in May. A searched launched to find Gilbert led detectives to the discovery of four decomposed women–allegedly all prostitutes–on Long Island beaches.

The last person who saw Gilbert was her driver, who said that she seemed to be delirious and refusing to leave her client’s home in a gated resort-area. She never gave the driver the client’s address, name, or phone number.  Following the discovery of the four bodies  (none of which was Gilbert) area police discovered the identity of Gilbert’s client and interrogated him about her whereabouts. Thus far, they do not believe he is involved, and believe that they may be on the trail of a serial killer on Long Island.

The Long Island case resembles an unsolved criminal investigation in the Atlantic City-area; in 2006 police discovered four decomposing bodies in a drainage ditch in Egg Harbor Township, and all four victims were linked to prostitution. Like the Long Island murders, the victims were killed elsewhere and dumped near a beach.

While specific details aren’t available, the New York Daily News reported that Atlantic County detectives were conferring with Long Island detectives about both cases.

While the Craigslist adult services section’s been removed, the site still operates its  ”Casual Encounters” section where people can seek out sexual partners. Craigslist has posted warnings on the Casual Encounters section, and requests that users flag illegal posts that contain adult content. The section also warns users to be aware of scam posts, and spam, but does not state anywhere that prostitution ads are in violation of the site’s policies.

Following a criminal investigation, Ofelia Garcia, age 60, and ex-daughter-in-law, Maria Olvera-Garcia were charged.

The attack was launched after a series of domestic events; the elder Garcia found that her common law husband (Mr. Alvarez) of 32-years, admitted to having several relationships with Medina during the couple’s turbulent common-law matrimony. When Mr. Alvarez quit the elder Garcia for good, he began a monogamous relationship with the victim (Medina). When his common-law wife confronted Alvarez, he admitted his affair. The 60-year old grandmother reacted in violent anger, trying at one point to hire a Private Detective in an effort to locate Medina. While the details have not been released, the private detective declined to take Garcia’s case.

Somehow, the two Garcia women located Medina after their efforts to solicit an investigator failed. Ofelia Garcia, afraid to attack Medina on her own, sought help from three local juveniles. Their orders were to beat Medina with a bat, steal her purse, and pour sulfuric acid on her.  The attack took place in July 2008 as Medina left her home for work.

As more details were discovered regarding the case, the twisted relationship between Ofelia Garcia and Mr. Alvarez rose to the surface; the elder Garcia’s accomplice, her ex-daughter-in-law, had an affair with Mr. Alvarez at one point during the common-law marriage.

A third woman, Linda Dirzo, was also charged; she transported the juveniles to Medina’s home on that fateful July 2008 morning.

Olvera-Garcia, one-time daughter-in-law, confessed that Ofelia Garcia offered her between $5,000 and $6,000 to disfigure Medina’s face with a knife. When she refused, they both decided to recruit the teens.

Since the attack, both the three women, and the three teens, have been incarcerated while awaiting trial. Linda Dirzo, the driver who transported the teens to Medina’s home, died in jail in December 2009. Two of three teens plead guilty to aggravated battery charges. The third teen, a female that served as a lookout, received two years probation.

We applaud the Private Investigator who turned down Ofelia Garcia’s case; not only does it show an upright stance regarding the law, but it also reveals a good bit of common sense in the face of a criminal act that’s extremely rare.

US Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS Device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn’t violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway – and no reasonable expectation that the government isn’t tracking your movements.

That is the bizarre – and scary – rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants – with no need for a search warrant.

It is a dangerous decision – one that, as the dissenting judges warned, could turn America into the sort of totalitarian state imagined by George Orwell. It is particularly offensive because the judges added insult to injury with some shocking class bias: the little personal privacy that still exists, the court suggested, should belong mainly to the rich.

This case began in 2007, when Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents decided to monitor Juan Pineda-Moreno, an Oregon resident who they suspected was growing marijuana. They snuck onto his property in the middle of the night and found his Jeep in his driveway, a few feet from his trailer home. Then they attached a GPS Tracking Device to the vehicle’s underside.

After Pineda-Moreno challenged the DEA’s actions, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit ruled in January that it was all perfectly legal.

More disturbingly, a larger group of judges on the circuit, who were subsequently asked to reconsider the ruling, decided this month to let it stand. (Pineda-Moreno has pleaded guilty conditionally to conspiracy to manufacture marijuana and manufacturing marijuana while appealing the denial of his motion to suppress evidence obtained with the help of GPS.)

In fact, the government violated Pineda-Moreno’s privacy rights in two different ways. For starters, the invasion of his driveway was wrong. The courts have long held that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their homes and in the “curtilage,” a fancy legal term for the area around the home. The government’s intrusion on property just a few feet away was clearly in this zone of privacy.

The judges veered into offensiveness when they explained why Pineda-Moreno’s driveway was not private. It was open to strangers, they said, such as delivery people and neighborhood children, who could wander across it uninvited. (See the misadventures of the CIA.)

Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, who dissented from this month’s decision refusing to reconsider the case, pointed out whose homes are not open to strangers: rich people’s. The court’s ruling, he said, means that people who protect their homes with electric gates, fences and security booths have a large protected zone of privacy around their homes. People who cannot afford such barriers have to put up with the government sneaking around at night.

Judge Kozinski is a leading conservative, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, but in his dissent he came across as a raging liberal. “There’s been much talk about diversity on the bench, but there’s one kind of diversity that doesn’t exist,” he wrote. “No truly poor people are appointed as federal judges, or as state judges for that matter.” The judges in the majority, he charged, were guilty of “cultural elitism.” (Read about one man’s efforts to escape the surveillance state.)

The court went on to make a second terrible decision about privacy: that once a GPS Device has been planted, the government is free to use it to track people without getting a warrant. There is a major battle under way in the federal and state courts over this issue, and the stakes are high. After all, if government agents can track people with secretly planted GPS devices virtually anytime they want, without having to go to a court for a warrant, we are one step closer to a classic police state – with technology taking on the role of the KGB or the East German Stasi.

Fortunately, other courts are coming to a different conclusion from the Ninth Circuit’s – including the influential U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. That court ruled, also this month, that tracking for an extended period of time with GPS is an invasion of privacy that requires a warrant. The issue is likely to end up in the Supreme Court.

In these highly partisan times, GPS monitoring is a subject that has both conservatives and liberals worried. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit’s pro-privacy ruling was unanimous – decided by judges appointed by Presidents Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. (Comment on this story.)

Plenty of liberals have objected to this kind of spying, but it is the conservative Chief Judge Kozinski who has done so most passionately. “1984 may have come a bit later than predicted, but it’s here at last,” he lamented in his dissent. And invoking Orwell’s totalitarian dystopia where privacy is essentially nonexistent, he warned: “Some day, soon, we may wake up and find we’re living in Oceania.”

Cohen, a lawyer, is a former TIME writer and a former member of the New York Times editorial board.