http://www.bomega.com/2007/06/03/plazes-ceo-and-founder-exposed-by-own-tools/
If you don’t want the world to know where you are you shouldn’t use Plazes. Plazes posts your location to a map whenever you connect to a Wi-Fi access point. Pretty cool unless you are claiming to be somewhere where you are not.

You would think the founder and CEO of Plazes knows this.

Apparently not.

Last friday Felix Petersen was supposed to be speaking at the Next Web Conference in Amsterdam. On thursday (May, 31 2007 16:41:47 GMT+02:00) he sent this message:

I will have to cancel on you guys. We have some severe problems with the new version that we launched yesterday and also my 9month old daughter has become sick. Don´t know what is going on there exactly but my wife is really concerned and I will have to get back to Berlin asap.

Sounds pretty serious. We wished him good luck with everything and assumed he went home on the first flight he could get.

On Friday we received a message from someone at Reboot who said:

Felix Petersen is here in Copenhagen…

We couldn’t believe it.
Could it really be true?
Apparently so:

So maybe this is just someone who looks like Felix?
Or an old photo?
Could it be wrong?

Lets take a look at Plazes.com:

http://beta.plazes.com/whereis/felixpetersen

Ok, Reboot seems to rock after some dinner, beer and wine. Great.
The amazing thing is not that Felix would rather go to Reboot. I respect that. The amazing thing is that someone would lie about the health of his children to be able to drink beer at another conference and then assume that no one would find out.

And maybe his child suddenly got better and the technical problems were fixed sooner than he thought. Or maybe he was booked as a speaker at Reboot too and forgot all about it. Or maybe something else happened that explains everything.

It is all possible. But wouldn’t it have been nice, appropriate and decent for him to let us know?

You would think that the founder of Plazes would know the impact of his own tools…

Update: Felix Petersen writes:

I must say I´m really confused by the commotion. My kid was sick on Tursday and it wasn´t entirely clear wether I could attend thenextweb the next day. In addition did we have some issues with the new Plazer (http://blog.plazes.com/?p=157#comments) and Stefan, my co-founder was coming to Reboot on Friday. So for professional and personal issues I decided to cancel since I wasn´t sure at that point that I could make it. Boris forgot to mention the last part of my email:

“And to be fair to you guys I rather cancel now than trying until the last minute and then not being able to come afterall.”

So I can´t really see what the commotion is about.

Best,
Felix

I actually don’t care that much about the specifics - I think it’s fascinating that Plazes can and is being used to check up on people, though, to see if they are being honest about their whereabouts.

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